For Ada Lovelace Day

A part-cheat post for this, really, since I cannot but acknowledge Andrew Back's post earlier at http://carrierdetect.com/?p=140 about Bletchley Park's women workers. I'd like to reinforce the point about the female Wrens (from the Women's Royal Naval Service) who did all the laborious but essential stuff.

I've just finished reading Paul Gannon's 'Colossus', and it's clear that the male codebreakers and cypher experts could only have
succeeded with the hard, diligent and expert work of the women there. Most were very young, under 20 years of age, and educated but not mathematicians or cryptographers. Many however became responsible for Colossus machines, and managing the complex inputs and processes. Some were also trained by the engineers to undertake testing of the machines.

By the end of the war there were over 2,000 of them at Bletchley Park or satellite sites, working on the Bombes (codebreaking machines for Enigma encrypted messages) or on the Colossi (for the teleprinter encyphered messages).

The work at BP helped the allied cause enormously, and it is only relatively recently that it has become appreciated. Many Wrens did some of the first real 'computing' jobs. They ought to be highlighted and recognised as computing heroines of the first order.

Desktop frustrations

Be prepared for a bit of a rant. I love computers (some more than others, and you'll know what I mean). I use one for much of most workdays. But I fight it too much of the time. At least I feel I am. Now some of that is my own clumsy ineptitude (I don't touch type, and I am ignorant of some of Windows' tricks and tips). But I have been reflecting on how they haven't really progressed in many ways since DOS.

DOS used directories. Windows put a layer of UI onto that with Folders. Folders are very simple concept, and very easy to use. But when you have zillions of files for dozens of projects that are constantly changing, folders just ain't up to it IMHO. 

Windows Explorer is a poor tool to use. OS X Finder is better - just. (Leopard was touted pre-beta-launch as including a new Finder, but we only got cosmetic improvements.) In WE, you cannot have anything but an alphanumeric order (so I have to cludge the order by prefixing the folder names with 'a' and 'aa' and 'aaa'. No colour of the folder or the text. No alternative fonts (bold, even) to allow you to differentiate. Finder allows a bit of this (colour, re-ordering in the sidebar).

In the olden days, I used to use different ways of ordering paper: different types of clips (bulldog, paperclip, treasury tags - those short pieces of narrow cord with metal T-end pieces - rubber bands. And I had different sizes and types of containers: box files. card folders, transparent sleeves and so on. 

All different shapes and sizes and colours. Big bold descriptors on the front. Containers in containers. And I used all of these to categorise my work. I could find anything easily. A very usable system, with a great an flexible and instantly recognised and assimilated 'UI'.

On my PC desktop I have Folders. All look the same. All with same font. All the same colour (OK, some colour in Finder). All only in alpha order, no shifting them up and own. No tagging or marking. Unbelievably crude, poorly differentiated, unhelpful, clunky. (Yes, I have search (Spotlight, Desktop Search) but they take time.)

Why are we in this position? 

Where is the Tweetdeck (which allows flexible categorisation of incoming Tweets) for Outlook? Where is the delicious-like metatagging for emails? Where are the metaphorical clips and containers on the desktop? Why can't you re-order folders in WE? Or colour them or use bold text to differentiate?

Where are the developers out there to write tools that will take us away from a state that hasn't - really - moved on since DOS?

Devices and users - 2

Most of the apps on the iPhone App Store you can get on a iPod Touch.
Whilst iPhone continues to generate most of the industry interest and
catalyst for the mad designing and launching of a myriad of (almost
'me too') SmartPhones, the iPod Touch is the quiet, brilliant little
brother product. It's as clever as an iPhone and much less expensive.

Sony Ericsson's Idou will have a 12.1 Megapixel camera "good enough
for a professional photographer". But any pro snapper will tell you
it's not just the pixel count that matters in producing a great image
- it's the processing, the sensitivity of the sensor, and, of course,
the lens.

Devices and users - 1

Interesting things being announced at Mobile World Congress in
Barcelona. Lots of new touch-screen phones, all chasing the iPhone.
Fancy that.

From this "Bond-style wristwatch phone joins gizmo assault on Apple"
at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/17/smartphones-mobile-
world-congress-barcelona. "assault on Apple", "hope will give them a
much-needed edge over Apple's iPhone", "sparked by the launch of
Apple's iPhone in summer 2007", "hopes to gain the upper hand against
Apple", "particularly desperate to hit back at Apple". Get the picture?

New devices from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, LG, etc. And Nokia
announced a new apps store. The point is made that "the iPhone showed
that the combination of cutting edge technology and ease of use could
create a real buzz" (Richard Wray).

Apple did what they did with iPod - and through their real user-
centric approach, made a product design work brilliantly. The rest
now copy madly, as fast as they can.

I'd love to know how genuinely user-centric the other manufacturers
are with their product design and development processes, compared
with Apple. Are they (I speculate wildly) purely imitating product
functionality and features and adding wizzy-ness, just to add to the
product feature specs? Or are they actually considering usability and
what users would find properly useful and usable?

On the back page of the main section, O2/Apple had a full page ad
saying that there are over 15,000 apps on App Store, covering
anything you'd ever want to do.

Twittering and social media - 2

So maybe the next new, new thing is Google Latitude. http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html But it’s just a novelty, surely?

Privacy concerns – maybe. You’d certainly have to be careful when using the (approximate) automatic location updates, to remember who you have given permission to and where you are. The potential of course comes from what else it will be able to do: match your location with local services, act as an alternative to foot-bound map reading, find out where your younger children are? Not sure. 

Whatever, it must be tied in with Google Android mobile OS and the T-Mobile G1, so it’ll be interesting to see what’s coming next.

 

Twittering and social media - 1

I can barely keep up. Too much Twittering. Let alone RSSed news and blog feeds. It seems to be  getting to that critical mass stage where it seems that everybody is doing it (well, almost). It’s now being talked about in the mainstream media.

Bobbie Johnson said yesterday that he felt that ‘I'm finished with 'social media' http://bit.ly/JNXZ Eh? Up to a point, he’s right. Social media are just another way for people to keep in touch, to chat, to gossip. Nothing new, so why all the fuss and bother?

You can argue that they give people a means to do it faster, to more people (globally), and more often, and more easily and cheaply.

Hence that fact that I cannot keep up. Filtering the mass of stuff is a problem. Some Tweeters seem to be constantly tweeting, pushing other useful Tweets down and off the page (and the next…) too often in my view. And with all those bit.ly links to follow too. Impossible.

Some tools allow you to do this better (TweetDeck, for instance) but even they need effort to set up and get going and maintain.

Time soaks away.

I wonder what the next ‘new, new’ thing will be?

Cloud computing - and corporate control and privacy - 2

Cloud computing really everywhere at present, as a news story, as an issue, as a debate. Coming to some sort of stage of development or maturity. It’s seen as an opportunity and the way of the future, and growing fast. But I reckon there’s lots of different definitions and variations on the theme and elements of the core concept.

Also, where are the debates about security and information assurance? What security and information usage assurances ought we to expect from cloud computing service providers?