Emergency broadcasts

The air is fragrant with smoke, the sky transected with grey. Since last night we have been told to stay at home and defend our house from ember attack.

Bush fires are a fact of life in this area. Back in 1994 my wife was living with her family in another part of this suburb and I was in Canberra, proving updates to the world over Internet Relay Chat based upon television reports.

Now as a resident of the affected area I have a personal interest in how information about the fire is communicated. The nature of media has changed since then and I've got some thoughts about the coverage of the bush fires from a local perspective.

Expectations

We live in the Information Age and as such expect to have access to instantaneous and detailed information about events. The better the information you have, the better you can plan your actions. That is true both for those fighting the fire and those potentially affected by it.

I'm not certain how much information is gathered and available to the fire service from assets on the ground, in the air and in space. It would be interesting to find out. Potentially a lot, but combining that information into something useful for making decisions would be a challenging task.

I can imagine a mesh of sensors on firefighters, fire trucks, drones, aircraft and static assets all sending information back to base to be processed and combined by artificial intelligence. Challenging indeed.

And how to make that information available to the public?

Traditional media

During emergencies we are expected to turn to television, as I did in 1994, and radio for information. I did both but found the experience somewhat disappointing. Being a Saturday night the commercial television stations were more concerned with sports events and the sole free-to-air 24 hour news station, ABC News 24, was primarily filled with non-current news programming or reports on the airstrikes in Syria. This is the problem with being an underfunded national broadcaster, most of your audience are unaffected by regional fires.

Instead you are suggested to turn to ABC Local Radio, which suddenly presents an issue. Who has an AM radio outside of their car these days? I've got an old cassette player downstairs, but if the power went out I'd be in trouble finding any big batteries for it. Most devices run on something smaller.

I still have some FM radios in older mobile phones, though they too are being phased out by manufacturers. Still, it's a pity they don't have an FM broadcast instead. It does suggest I should buy a small AM capable radio, which would have the advantage of picking up the cricket as well!

Fortunately you can listen to ABC Local Radio streamed over the internet, but this takes up valuable bandwidth in emergencies and the infrastructure is more vulnerable to destruction than a distant radio transmitter.

Much as I like the ABC, the other downside of having to listen out for updates over the radio is putting up with their regular programming in between. I just have a different taste to music.

Social media and the Web

The other major source of information these days is social media. Everyone thinks it's something new, but as mentioned above, I was using it back in 1994!

There are useful websites such as the official Fires Near Me and Google's Crisis Map. The issue with the former is the very limited information it provides.

I followed updates from the NSW Rural Fire Service Twitter account, which shared interesting line scan maps of fire areas and videos, and local Facebook pages.

The problem with social media is information pollution. Official updates on Twitter get lost in streams of irrelevant updates from other accounts and on Facebook masses of non-time ordered questions and comments from ordinary (or worse, narcissistic) citizens. There is also the big issue of incorrect or malicious information (so called "fake news") can be inserted into these streams.

There should be an app for that

If one doesn't exist already I'm thinking it would be useful to have an official emergency warnings app for mobile phones. The app would have the following features:

• An ability to detect the user's location or allow them to subscribe to other locations (useful when you are outside the area)
• Emergency push broadcasts (eg imminent tsunami or new fire detected in your area)
• On demand lookup as well as broadcast streaming of updates 
• Interrupt media streams when updates are broadcast, allowing the user to listen to locally stored or streamed music or video without missing updates
• Audio and video output as well as text (user selects).
• Provide maps of affected areas and relevant transport updates.

Maybe there could be a forum or social media component to it focused only on that event, but not sure if that would be necessary or just too much trouble.

Might get chatting with some people at work to see what is already out there and what they think.

Right now the conditions have eased and it looks like we should be able to get a good night's sleep tonight. Even if we haven't as yet been directly affected it's certainly been a good opportunity to consider our disaster preparedness. And many, many thanks to all the emergency services for working so very hard to keep us safe. They are fantastic.

Bare Conductive Arduino MP3 Player

I found the Bare Conductive Touch Board Starter Kit while searching for activities to do with my almost nine year old son over the school holidays. It contains a custom Arduino board with a built in microSD card reader and audio output along with twelve electrode that can be used for touch or proximity sensor input. There is also a jar and tube of black conductive paint, a brush for painting them on alligator clip wires and adhesives, stencils and cardboard cutouts for designing the sensors. A 128 MB microSD card, USB card reader and portable speaker round out the collection.

The idea is that you either paint on the sensors or clip the wires to metallic objects so that when touched it triggers the playing an MP3 track.

It turned out to be a bit too complicated for a 9 year old, but my son likes to fall asleep and wake up to music and I had the idea that I would use the kit to make an interesting MP3 player on Alex's bedhead.

The first thing was to program the Arduino board, something I was now familiar with after the ticket gate project. The code examples provided were only for the triggering of single tracks, whereas I wanted proper player navigation. This included the ability to:

• Stop, play, pause and skip tracks
• Shuffle tracks
• Change the volume
• Play collections

By default the library used by the code only plays files named in the format TRACKxxx.mp3, where each x is a number 0 to 9. I did see some code for alternative names, but couldn't get it to work so I stuck with that format.

When the shuffle mode is selected random tracks are picked. Each played track is added to a list which is scanned to ensure that it is not repeated. Skipping a track forwards or backwards only moves to the next number and doesn't use random selection.

For playing collections I made a subdirectory, in my case called sleep and placed the relevant tracks in there. I also swapped the 128 MB microSD card for an 2 GB card I'd got with an old phone. This is the largest size supported by the FAT16 library. 

The code, listed at the bottom of the post, is memory intensive and occasionally locks, but it mostly seems to work.

The need to manually copy and rename tracks made the player impractical for use by my son, who also likes current pop. Instead a I got him a portable bluetooth speaker and an old mobile phone with Google Play Music installed.

Still, after all that effort I decided to get my player working anyway and painted up a pre-primed MDF board with the stencil, affixing the Arduino board and speaker at the bottom. Each silhouette corresponds to a control. It's not intuitive, but it is artistic and I might add to the design later. I like the look of the bare white, gold and black Arduino as well, a nice reminder of what is usually hidden inside the designs.

Raspberry Pi 5 inch and 3.5 inch touch screens

After making the Arduino ticket gate I've been inspired to play with some of the other "maker" offerings available. I recently purchased a Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi Zero W to experiment with. That actually takes the Raspberry Pi in the house to three as I previously bought my son a Kano Computer, which also uses a Pi board.

The Raspberry Pi can be hooked up to a standard HDMI monitor, but I wanted to try something a bit smaller so I obtained an Adafruit 3.5" PiTFT Plus and a 5.0" HDMI touchscreen. The former came with a badly soldered header and I've yet to get it working. Its instructions are also woefully out of date and unsuitable for the current Raspbian Stretch version of the Linux OS. 

For both screens what you need is the LCD-Show code. However, if, like me, you installed Raspbian via NOOBS then you are likely to get a kernel panic after installing. Don't panic!

I found these instructions to be helpful, but in my case I needed to slightly modify the boot partition statement.

1. You need to edit /boot/cmdline.txt on the SD card, either before your Pi reboots or using a second Linux machine (fortunately I had the other Raspberry Pi Zero and a MicroSD card reader to do this on).
2. Replace root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 with root=/dev/mmcblk0p7

If editing on a second computer put the MicroSD back in the Pi's slot and reboot.

Everything should now work and you've now got a small Linux device. Not as small as my old Zaurus handheld PC's but a lot more hackable.

Size comparison between the Raspberry Pi with 5" screen and a standard mouse

Arduino ticket gate - part 1

Alex is obsessed with automatic ticket gates and desperately wants one to play with in the house. Don't ask me why.

The mechanisms in automatic paper ticket gates are extraordinarily complicated and not something I could hope or want to recreate at home. However, modern gates tend to use RFID stored value cards to trigger them.

Using parts from an Arduino education kit along with an RFID module I bought at Jaycar I was able to build a simple system that triggers a servo motor when an RFID card is tapped on the sensor. It also changes the red LED to the green and plays a sound. I put a delay in to "hold the gate open".

The cheap RFID module seems a bit dodgy and the system often requires a few reboots to work. This is the first time I've soldered and used a circuit board in years. I haven't used the Arduino much either, just following a few of the examples given in the book. Still, I'm pretty pleased with the result!

Using the Arduino is so much easier than the electronics I did at uni and as a kid.

The next step is to put it in some housing and attach a "gate" to the servo. Going to get Alex's help to do that.

Sketch


/**
 * Ticket gate model
 * Detect RFID chip and trigger a servo
 */

#include  
#include
#include

#define SS_PIN 10
#define RST_PIN 9
#define GREEN_PIN 6
#define RED_PIN 7
#define PIEZO_PIN 8
#define SERVO_PIN 5

Servo gateServo;
int openTime = 5000;

MFRC522 mfrc522(SS_PIN, RST_PIN);  // Create MFRC522 instance.

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600); // Initialize serial communications with the PC
  gateServo.attach(SERVO_PIN);
  gateServo.write(90);
  pinMode(GREEN_PIN, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(RED_PIN, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(PIEZO_PIN, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(GREEN_PIN, LOW);
  digitalWrite(RED_PIN, HIGH);
  
  SPI.begin();      // Init SPI bus
  mfrc522.PCD_Init(); // Init MFRC522 card
}

void loop() {
  // Look for new cards
  if ( ! mfrc522.PICC_IsNewCardPresent()) {
    return;
  }

  // Select one of the cards
  if ( ! mfrc522.PICC_ReadCardSerial()) {
    return;
  }

  gateServo.write(180);
  digitalWrite(GREEN_PIN, HIGH);
  digitalWrite(RED_PIN, LOW);
  tone(PIEZO_PIN, 261, 100);
  delay(100);
  tone(PIEZO_PIN, 392, 200);
  delay(openTime);
  gateServo.write(90);
  digitalWrite(GREEN_PIN, LOW);
  digitalWrite(RED_PIN, HIGH);
  mfrc522.PICC_HaltA();
}

Sun sets, but Oracle didn't predict it

Oracle has quietly shut down the remnants of Sun's Sparc processor and Solaris operating system lines. Both Sun and Oracle have made a huge impact on my life.

Back in 1992 I had my first encounter with Unix in a numerical mathematics course at the ANU. A number of our lessons were held in the university's computer labs housing Sun Sparc terminals. I marvelled at the huge high resolution greyscale CRT screens, opening terminals and text editors to edit and run Matlab scripts on the Solaris server. They looked so much nicer than the PCs and Macs we used elsewhere. Long before they were readily available for PCs these terminals used laser mice, though they required a special mouse mat to operate.

A year later, when I bought my first modem, I would connect into a Solaris Unix server via the terminal and access my email and play IRC. I met my wife over Solaris.

As a result of my Internet obsession I drifted into the role of web developer, eventually gaining employment at CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility managing their website. The site ran on a Solaris 2.6 server and for a time I even had a Sparc terminal to access it.

It was here that Oracle came into the picture. I built some web applications utilising the Oracle database, the only one available to me.

By this stage I was not a fan of either Solaris or Oracle (or 'Orrible as called by some). Much of the open internet ran on open source solutions like Linux and MySQL and, as expensive commercial products, the Oracle database and Solaris operating system often required custom compilations of libraries and custom rewrites of code. Our version of Solaris only supported 256 colours, meaning that images supplied by our users were often of too poor quality to use on the web.

A lot of time that could have been spent developing practical applications was instead wasted just wrangling the systems to work in the first place.

Eventually that job finished and I ended up writing PHP scripts on a Windows IIS box, which was a whole new set of pain.

Today I am still writing PHP, but running it on a Ubuntu Linux server, which is an extremely popular and well supported combination meaning that it's easy to find answers to problems online. But I haven't escaped Oracle, which acquired Sun in 2009, entirely. We use the very popular MySQL as our database and that was purchased by Oracle as well.

By all accounts the marriage between Sun and Oracle was not a happy one (it certainly wasn't on our servers) and I'm sad to see the disappearance of the former. Farewell!

TV vs Tablet

I inadvertently performed a little test of consuming a television program via a television as compared with a tablet.

After catching up with the previous episode of the ABC's excellent series Cleverman on their iView app on my tablet I then watched the following episode "live" on a dumb television.

On iView I had constantly paused at the difficult bits, when I wanted more information about something or been interrupted. Now that wasn't possible - it was all in one go.

I quite enjoyed it, plus the 576i picture quality looked better on a 37" full HD screen at a distance than on a 10" 2K screen up close.

Didn't stop me from catching up on some Chaser's Election Desk on iView afterwards. The freedom of being able to watch things at your own convenience is great, but so is doing something free of distraction.

Silicon Vallergy

"Nobody talks about teleports to Japan."

Not true!

Few things give me a headache like tech marketers. Unfortunately my organisation has been invaded by Silicon Valley alumni. You can tell. Long term scientific programs have been cut in favour of short term trendy "research" and "innovation". Apparently, a huge amount of data simply comes into existence in a magic cloud without anyone needing to do the unexciting task of collecting it in the first place.

So there I was stuck in a meeting with an ex-Yahoo marketing "guru" and entrepreneur.

He was "taking us on a journey" in our quest for "followers". Or some such crap. I was busy wondering how anybody could speak so many words yet say so little.

At the same time he spruiked Zeetings, some Web presentation/conversation web application he had some connection with. What I found telling is that as soon as he stopped using it, so did we. Not a compelling piece of technology then.

Marketing dude asked us for some words to describe the venture.

"How come nobody is talking about disruption?"

In the best moment of the day, somebody piped up that it was because the organisation has been in a permanent state of disruption for the past 5 years and everyone (barring the consultants) is sick of it. Disruption is a dirty word, we said.

And so the tide turned in the meeting, with the more forceful techies and researchers taking control and the only one paying attention to Mr Marketing was his offsider. We actually got some real work done figuring out practical requirements rather than meaningless aspirational buzzwords.

I still got a headache.

Why you think I hate Microsoft

Every popular, or once popular, operating system has its fans. Who doesn't know an Apple fanboy (or fangirl), with their fervent agreement with every utterance from Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook? Or the Linux freedom fighter, for whom a command line equals "desktop ready"? There are even those that can't let go of their Amiga.

But there is another group who are surprisingly not as well recognised. Surprising, because theirs is the most popular opeating system of all, at least as far as personal computers are concerned.

I'm talking about Microsoft.

Let’s be clear about something. I use Microsoft products and have done so for decades. My desktop computers all run Windows, including my work laptop. I used to program in Microsoft BASIC and more recently (though somewhat reluctantly) in C# and .Net. I've maintained Web servers running IIS and even used FrontPage. At work we use Outlook.

Microsoft do make some good and useful products. But in geekdom Microsoft has traditionally been seen as the Evil Empire, to be distrusted and opposed at every opportunity.

So it has come as a shock to find people jumping out of the woodwork to vigorously and publicly defend Microsoft products from criticism.

Fair enough, you say. If they make good products then they should be supported. However, a closer analysis of the defenders' arguments actually illustrates the flaws in Microsoft's traditional strategy and why it has been losing market share.

Yes it is cloud-based allrite, but the fact that you can use it simultaneously across multiple devices with proper version control, op-locking, etc. puts it miles ahead of iOS. Google's services are okay, but as 90+% of the corporate desktop uses Microsoft Office I don't bother with it.

And yes, SharePoint is an incredibly helpful suite if used appropriately. Poor user practices and system implementation does not make it an inferior product. But hey, you could always use TRIM or some other form of EDMS if you're prepared to put up with the pain and lack of mobile support.
SKay, December 11, 2015 
Microsoft Lumia 950 XL phone review: different, but not in a good way

The above comment illustrates very well the issues.

1. The comment author assumes that the only corporate environments matter and that only Microsoft is suitable for enterprise environments.
2. They blame the user for not using the product properly rather than the usability of the product.

SharePoint is my tool of choice for revealing the true corporate Microsoft fan. We once did a competitive evaluation between intranet content management systems and invited representatives from Microsoft to pitch SharePoint. They arrived terribly cocky, assuming their product was the best and couldn't be bothered to answer the questions we'd sent them, dismissing them away as "You would need to program it"rather than providing them out of the box like the eventual winner did.

I've used SharePoint at work. It's had gaping usability, standards compliance and systems maintenance issues, yet the Microsoft fans insist that it's suitable for something other than a document sharing platform. Even then it's a version dependent pain compared with, say, Google Docs. Even Microsoft themselves don't seem to love it so much any more.

Now that Internet Explorer has won the browser wars.

That was a quote from a course I attended around three years ago about building websites using .Net. It wasn't true then and it certainly isn't true today (even Microsoft are dumping IE for Edge), especially with so much browsing done on non-Microsoft phones.

But the true Microsoft fan can't see that anyone would seriously use a non-Microsoft product. Their world is the corporate world of centrally managed systems where everything is Microsoft. They seem to struggle to acknowledge that there other enterprise players. After all, in their minds, who would use an Oracle database when SQLServer exists? There is a blindness to alternatives.

This course was funny in that it taught web application development from the perspective of a desktop application developer. They thought web pages should look like and act like Windows desktop applications.

Ha ha. Why would you make something that ugly?

Microsoft has a long history of making stuff ups with regards to the Internet and the Web. Rather than stick to agreed third party standards they subverted them with products that produced ugly and bloated code that only worked properly in Microsoft products. I have had enough of trying to fix Microsoft Office and FrontPage generated HTML to last me a lifetime.

You see, Microsoft has traditionally been the enemy of interoperability. You want to use something outside of their environment? You always run into some barrier they've erected, some proprietary extension that is required to do what other products can handle almost seamlessly.

To be fair I think Microsoft has been changing under Satya Nadella and embracing a lot more openness and standards, but many of their supporters still seem to be stuck in the old ways. To a Microsoft fan it's your fault if you want something different. It's the Microsoft Way or the Highway.

Me, I like the highway. It's more scenic, usually cheaper and full of interesting things to explore and learn from. And if the diehard Microsoft fan gets in the way? There's always an alternative route, they just can't see it for themselves.

Ninetology

On a trip to Malaysia in October 2014 I discovered a mobile phone brand Ninetology advertising themselves everywhere. Having never heard of them before I looked them up. Here's how they described themselves:

Ninetology, prominently stands tall in the eyes of ASEAN as the most innovative company with extensive growth capabilities beyond expectations. Developed by elites and strongly driven by our league of experts with more than a decade of experience below their belts, we indulge in the golden rule to further our rapid movement throughout ASEAN.

The company evidently crafted a name for itself within just few years along with expeditious development of quality smart devices, instilled with world-class technologies. Giants of the communication industry, of both local and international networks have come together with Ninetology in creating a whole new platform of all-rounded communication accessibility. Ninetology is not just about smart phones; it is an ecosystem upholding the most intelligent way of communication and assurance of worldwide connectivity.

Ninetology is marching fast and closer in achieving its ultimate goal as the hub of mobile intelligence and a one-stop brand for great ASEAN innovations. We are on the right track, looking at the milestone of progressions as the largest mobile technology provider across the region.

Definitely deserving of an award for the best use of buzzwords without actually saying anything.

They were obviously original thinkers when it came to language as they named one of their tablets the Outlook Xpress (sounds familiar?).

Less than a year later and it looks like the company doesn't exist any more. Maybe this headline explains why:

Ninetology LTE phone can rival Amazon Fire

If you haven't heard of the Amazon Fire, Wired had this to say:

The Amazon Fire Phone was always going to fail

Even the slickest marketing cannot replace building products that people actually want.

UPDATE
It turns out that Ninetology were acquired by AVAXX, who it turns out are not associated with the anti-vaccination network (anti-vaxxers):

THE PHILOSOPHY BEHIND OUR NAME & LOGO

We may be young & dynamic, but we've an age-old philosophy on service.

Our very NAME is testimony to this discipline.

AVAXX is acronym for Achieving Very Admirable Xcellence by going the Xtra mile. This is the inspirational fire that propels us to do better than the norm. It is more than an internal motivational battle cry. It is, for all intent and purposes, our daily way of life.

How does this relate to you?

Well, it is our aspiration that from your perspective, AVAXX would soon be an acronym for A Very Awesome Xperience Xceeding expectations. So your rewarding experience is the result of our continuous dedications to service.

As you deal with us more and more, you will be convinced of our commitment: that as you constantly search for opportunities and solutions in telecommunications and IT, so shall we continue to enhance your lifestyle by empowering you with innovative cellular and wireless telecommunications products and services.

At AVAXX, we aim not just to be responsive but proactive to your needs.

Reinforcing the above esprit de corps is our Corporate LOGO.

In keeping with the essence of technology - change - our Logo design is highly contemporary with a high-tech feel. It is at the same time avant-garde solid.

Or they could just say what they really do: Distribute Nokia phones.

Alex and computers

Scratch

I was rather pleased to see Alex playing with Scratch this morning. It's a free Flash web tool designed for kids that enables them to write programs by connecting a variety of elements together. I think it's quite good for teaching kids about loops and logic.

I have also installed Microsoft Small Basic on his machine, though it might be a bit advanced for a six year old. Not for long, though.

Alex is rather obsessed with computers and is very comfortable using them. Right now he's very proud of his ability to change the desktop background in Windows 8. He also made his own slideshow movie with Movie Maker and another with YouTube.

The obsession can be rather funny though. He may be the only person who like Ctrl-Alt-Del and typing in passwords, getting rather upset that you don't have to do it this way for home machines, unlike enterprise systems at school and work.

He also wanted Word and PowerPoint. Unwilling to shell out further money for both until he actually needs them, I installed LibreOffice instead and told him that it was the latest version, newer than at school (him being used to this with Windows 8.1 instead of the school's Windows 7) and that's why the icons are different.

I must get him on to Linux as well. He prefers the iPad to his Windows 8 convertible laptop/tablet, but the reason I chose the latter is that it runs Adobe Flash, which a lot of educational websites, including Scratch, still require.

Unfortunately, the Microsoft Parental Controls are an annoying pain to use, though still beneficial when it comes to learning what not to click on.

What I really need to get working on is controls on YouTube to prevent certain useless topics from being displayed (e.g. EvanTubeHD, adult reviews of toys and endless computer game commentary). There's so much else that's educational or creative that could be watched instead.

I think back to reading my parents' 1950s medical textbooks, full of grotesque diseases largely unknown due to vaccines and antibiotics. Now Alex watches the highly educational Operation Ouch on ABC iView and can tell us the most remarkable medical facts. I'm quite envious actually!

The next travel computer...

... Is a phone.

I've long been enamoured with small, highly portable computers, back to the days of a programmable Sharp calculator. My last couple of notebooks have been very thin and light, perfect for carrying around in a normal backpack. So far nothing has been able to beat the flexibility of a full PC.

The notebook serves as a tool for copying and uploading photos from the camera, for looking up information and checking into flights, for typing blogs and fixing up issues at work.

However, with these carry-on luggage only cheap flights ever gram and every centimetre counts. And phones are becoming even more capable. My Sony Z2 has the same number of screen pixels as my ultrabook. The same as my full HD television actually. A USB port, a micro SD reader and many other features.

Sure storage is an issue, to be solved either with bigger or more memory cards (back to the old days of travelling with digital cameras) or using online storage as the only backup. Google's Android operating system integrates well with their Google+ photo service, naturally enough.

Chrome also mostly mimics the abilities of the desktop version.

The problem is the keyboard. Typing thousands of words on the small screen is tough. I bought one tiny bluetooth keyboard from Japan, but it's just too small and requires function key presses to get numbers and popular characters. So now I'm trying the Rapoo E6500 mini bluetooth keyboard. That's what I'm typing this on. So far, so good!

Wouldn't mind a mini bluetooth mouse though. Sure I can find one.

The keys are not as nice as my notebooks, all of which I selected partly for their keyboards (the VAIO P being a case in point - magnificent keyboard for such a tiny computer). But good enough to type quite accurately and quickly.

I'm sure that I'll still be taking the ultrabook on many future trips, but I'll give this setup some further testing to see if it suffices for those situations where space is at an absolute premium.

This is why Microsoft are uncool

Robert Scoble argues that Microsoft has lost its cool on today's Sydney Morning Herald website. I actually found Joseph S' pro-Microsoft comments below the article to be a better illustration than Scoble's.

This discussion is ludicrous. Microsoft is not solely a one dimensional consumer app or gadget company. It remains the world leader in business applications and platform support. The Office suite is still used every day in most businesses around the world. SQL Server has made major inroads into industrial strength datbase markets. Azure is a major leap forward in cloud service delivery and in the developer space tools like MVC Entity Framework and Silverlight are far more comprehensive and feature rich than competitor products. Sharepoint has become the leading business content repository. The world still uses Microsoft as the core business delivery platform. It seems the readers of this article are unaware of that. 

Firstly let me say I am not a Microsoft employee or acolyte but I have to disagree with some of your comments. I am a developer and I recently evaluated Java FX and .NET MVC for a complex multi layered browser based UML diagram modelling system. .NET MVC was selected so I don't agree that Java is taking over. Corporate and Government Azure uptake is slow because of concerns about data sovereignty. Microsoft has introduced a network utility to incorporate inhouse database servers. They are also building an Australian data centre. I dont understand the comment about SQL Server being stagnant. SQL Azure has hundreds of new instances a day. Windows 8 will take a while for Corporates to appreciate the benefits. With BYOD growing exponentially Win 8 offers a uniform OS across the desktop and the device. When you get into the service delivery area in Microsoft's development suites there are countless quite brilliant innovations happening all the time. These are largely unobservable to the public, but to claim that Microsoft do not innovate is simply nonsense.

Joseph is right that Microsoft is still heavily used in business and indeed it does have some good products (but not necessarily all those listed above). But I've found that those developers who have grown up within the Microsoft ecosystem struggle to understand that users may want to do things outside the Microsoft way. Maybe they don't want to build an enterprise app or invest in a year of Microsoft Certified training to write a simple program or website. Or maybe they want their application to interact with non-Microsoft products and data. Take his mention of Sharepoint - we use it, but it's a usability nightmare and traditionally doesn't play nice with non-Microsoft browsers and files.

Microsoft is not cool because Microsoft doesn't support diversity and choice. It's not agile or interested in letting users drive it's developments. Instead Microsoft wants to make those decisions for you and it doesn't understand any other way.

What's happened to the WWW?

I can't help but feel a sense of irony that on the very day I was preparing a web page for an upcoming talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, so was I also dismantling one of our few websites designed to let our researchers communicate with their peers.

The WWW was developed at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and home of the Large Hadron Collider for the purpose of allowing CERN researchers to share information about their experiments, facilities and the organisation itself, partly as a way of mitigating the loss of institutional knowledge due to staff turnover. The original proposal is fascinating for its outline of the problems and proposed solution and as Berners-Lee wrote:

"Perhaps a linked information system will allow us to see the real structure of the organisation in which we work."

When the WWW expanded out of CERN it was into other research organisations and the universities and the content was primarily scholarly in nature.

Today the WWW is a very different beast. While there is a massive amount of well researched information available resources online about an almost inconceivable range of subjects (take Wikipedia for example), the real driver appears to be advertising. Not just advertising driven giants like Google, Facebook and media outlets, but all sorts of organisations and individuals attempting to sell a product, service or even an opinion to readers online.

My organisation is not alone in forcing researchers to pass information to "communicators" who rewrite it for general consumption before it is allowed to go on the main organisational websites, even internally. The intended audience is almost never fellow researchers, but stakeholders with money (even if only the public's taxes). The content ceases to become a real information resource and instead becomes advertising.

Thankfully, there are initiatives for sharing organisational scientific information online through publications and data repositories. But for many the WWW is no longer a tool for opening up information for discovery and instead it is for controlling what information is available out in the open.

The whole point of the WWW was the ability to turn text into hyperlinks to more information about a term or resource. If that link pointed to an entirely different website then great, you had expanded the network of accessibility of that information. It's amazing what random paths you could be lead upon and what you could learn from such links. Now authors are often discouraged (apart from Wikipedia) from creating inline links, with what links that exist in a page usually designed to guide the reader along a specified path within the site.

Perhaps some of the responsibility for this change lies with web standards themselves. When it started the formatting options for web pages were very limited - the main point of a page was the content and the hyperlinks elsewhere. Now web development is all about format over content. No longer can anyone simply write up a HTML document for the web, now HTML standards are mindbogglingly complex and websites require the input of graphic designers, accessibility and search engine optimisation experts.

I love great design and the amazing tools now available online from banking and booking to satellite photo maps with incredible overlay options and video editing online. But I do wonder if the need to be visually stunning often prevents us from really communicating. It's like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" replacing a Sir David Attenborough docummentary. I think we've lost something precious in the transition.

• History of the World Wide Web

Updated on 2013-01-26 with comments about hyperlinks.

An Xperiamental keyboard

What's that, an even smaller Sony computer than my VAIO P? No! It's my Sony Xperia S mobile phone paired up with a Elecom TK-FBP029 bluetooth keyboard.

With its 1280 x 720 pixel screen and Android operating system the Xperia S makes for a decent and highly portable computer. However, I find the touch screen keyboards of mobile phones too inaccurate for substantial typing. There are also issues with the on screen keyboard using up a lot of screen space when accessing our corporate Outlook web mail site. So on my last trip to Japan I went in search of small keyboards that I could easily carry around with me.

Naturally there were plentiful iPad/iPhone compatible keyboards, but the Android selections were more limited. The keyboards were either too big or, in the case of the folding keyboards, too flimsy. I fell in love with the TK-FBP029 despite the packaging stating only that it was Apple compatible. Indeed, at first, I couldn'd get it to connect properly to my Xperia. Most of the bluetooth keyboards said they required Android 3.0 rather than the 2.3 the phone ran.

The keyboard did work with my Sony Tablet S running Ice Cream Sandwich, so I had hope that the upcoming rollout of ICS for the Xperia would fix the issue.

And it did! Switch on bluetooth on the phone, switch the keyboard on and wait to be asked to type in a four digit code. It took me a couple of goes, but I got it running pretty quickly.

The keyboard includes a combined cover/phone stand which unfortunately doesn't stay upright when placed on a table. I suspect that you are supposed to hold it in your hands and type with your thumbs. The phone is not held securely by the cover. I'm not sure it it would work better with an iPhone.

The key action is quite nice, especially when compared with many of the other small keyboards I tried. The major issues are that numbers are only accessible in conjunction with the Alt key and the space bar is very small. But all in all I'm quite impressed and look forward to further real world testing.

Remembering Telstra's Viatel

With the news that France's Minitel network is to be switched off this weekend I was prompted to recall Telstra's (or Telecom Australia's) version of this proto-internet. Back when we were looking to get a replacement for our Multitech (now Acer) MPF-II computer Dad brought home a brochure on the Telecom Australia's Viatel system.

This videotex system used a dedicated terminal to retrieve and submit information over the telephone network. To a kid who had read books like Ender's Game and feeling very isolated in rural Queensland access to online databases and information resources sounded wonderful. Unfortunately, it was too expensive to consider and we ended up with a Amstrad CPC 6128.

I was not to get home network access until 1993 when, while at university, I bought a 2400 baud modem for my 386SX PC. But that is another story...

You can read a lot more about Viatel at Peter Hosie's Promises, promises - Viatel and education, written back in 1985.

Controlling choice online

I sat through a Sitecore content management system presentation this morning where the representative used every buzzword under the Sun. In it he spruiked the software's Web Engagement Management capabilities, tracking and profiling visitors and serving up personalised content without them having control over the process. As he related how delighted he was that sites like Amazon knew what he liked and used that to tempt him to buy more I joked to colleagues that the definition of a marketing person is someone who doesn't find personalisation creepy. I do.

I guess that I appreciate personalisation of a non-financial service, such as a government website serving up only those documents and forms I need based upon information that I have given them. But I generally reject website applications that try to lead me on a path based upon what the site thinks I like. The problem is that you lose trust in them. What are they trying to hide from you?

If a website serves up different information based upon personalisation, what happens if you want something different? It's like foreign airline websites that only give you flights out of Australia when what you actually want to look up is for their fares domestically or between other countries. It really irritates me.

Not everyone obviously. Apparently regional personalisation worked wonders for EasyJet, filling the equivalent of two extra aircraft a day (or was it every hour?). For me, I would rather have the power of choice. Not them.

All a twitter on Apps Day

I posted over 100 tweets today under the username @AppsDay on behalf of the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation's Broadband Apps Day 2012 at the Australian Technology Park. The day featured a speakers from organisations ranging from Google and Microsoft to Woolworths and Ausgrid discussing potential applications for the National Broadband Network (NBN) and the issues associated with them.

Topics included home automation, health applications (including Dance Dance Revolution for seniors), application development and e-commerce.

There was a disappointing lack of discussion on the security and privacy issues associated with these applications. For instance, a Samsung rep was spruiking the control of household whitegoods from their televisions, phones and tablets. Yet there was a recent report of vulnerabilities in Samsung electronics, one of which could cause endless restarts in their televisions. Who might be watching you on those televisions as well?

The point about who owns your household data was also raised. Some of your devices like smart electricity and water meters may report directly back to suppliers via the NBN without the household owner being able to directly access that data. What about other devices sending usage information out to marketers. One speaker thought that users might want Harvey Norman to contact them to offer more energy saving devices based upon usage. That's actually quite scary.

There is a lot to think about with the potential for a ubiquitous broadband network with similarly ubiquitous connected devices.

A few speakers commented that the way people consumed entertainment has changed and that their children expected on demand video rather than traditional television and to interact with devices via touch, voice or gesture rather than the normal remote control. It's certainly been our experience with Alex.

I don't think that Twitter is the best medium for conference commentary. I quite miss IRC's live chatting and channels, though I think we could do even better today. I have some ideas for the ideal online conference tool...

Rather than use the big work laptop I brought in my trusty Sony VAIO P to do the tweeting. The keyboard is great for fast typing and quiet. Even better it's light and cool - important if you don't have a desk.

What I derived the most pleasure from was developing a web display of the conference tweets, which we put up on a big screen outside the lecture theatre. I wasn't happy with the lack of customisation options with other tools like Twitterfall, so I decided to write my own.

It took me around a day to combine the Twitter Search API with Javascript and PHP, along the way reminding myself how to use jQuery, AJAX and parse JSON formatted data, plus do some cool CSS3 effects. The actual programming is surprisingly simple, it's the eye-candy that took the time. Screenshots of the results below:

Opening logo screen

Twitter feed, updated every minute

No fun Microsoft

I had a lot of fun creating allrite@. There is something about learning and experimenting with a new programming language (Python) in Linux. As I trawled the web for instructions and tips there was a sense of participating in an enthusiastic group who took pleasure in contributing their knowledge to the greater community.

I never feel the same way about the Microsoft programming community. There is still a lot of enthusiasm, but it's a kind of bulldog enthusiasm, charging in and saying Microsoft is the way, the only way and get the f!@# out of my way. You want standards and interoperability? We've got our standards and interoperability between our own products: you don't need anything else.

Want some extra functionality? Somebody has a product/plugin for that. Now hand over your credit card details...

Microsoft's programming languages and tools may have a lot going for them and I certainly use their products on a daily basis. But it's not fun.

Announcing allrite@

Yesterday I released my latest website, allrite@, my new online travel journal. 

This was my first project written using Django, a python web framework. I haven't had time to do much programming lately, but I found Django's built in functionality, including sophisticated admin screens, to be a real time saver. I'm calling the journal platform Tatami (or maybe t@tami) after the Japanese straw matting that is a feature of their houses and ryokans. Plus it sounds like "ta ta me"!

Development was done on a $250 netbook running Ubuntu. It was such a pleasure using Linux again after being stuck in Windows land for so long.

Getting the system running on the Webfaction host was a bit of a pain. Somehow, through brute force mainly, I got it operational by yesterday morning.

I managed to add features such as an RSS feed, comments, image uploads, WYWSIWYG editor, nice urls and more. Planned features that I ran out of time to add include searching, faceted search using tags such as location and transport options (I had url issues with these), a better wider header image and improved layout and styling.

The reason I couldn't complete everything before initial release was because I was up against a very fixed deadline. My latest trip, a 10th anniversary holiday in Europe, started yesterday and I haven't brought the Linux netbook with me!

IYou can read about it at allrite@...

iView, therefor iCan't

I'm not certain that my desire for my son to be able to watch ABC television content on the iPad was such a good idea. Last month he used up our 25GB download limit watching ABC for Kids content using the ABC iView application on the iPad. For the last few days of the month we were limited to 64 Kb/s. Time to get some local copies of his favourite programs or do other activities not involving tablet computers.