We spent the weekend at a family wedding on Jersey, enjoying the sunshine and catching up with the extended clan. Because digital TV isn’t going to cover the Channel islands, quite a few of the family have signed up for Sky, but the cousins we were staying with didn’t have Sky + so we had to mute the ad breaks instead of pausing or fast forwarding (and there are a lot of ad breaks on in House). It struck me, not just because I’m so used to never watching live TV any more but because the day we flew out Ofcom released the annual survey on telecoms, TV and radio habits in the UK - and that says 15% of us have a PVR.

That’s twice as many people as were using a digital recorder in 2006 and quite a lot more than the 11.2% of mobile subscribers who are using 3G. It’s not as big as the 30% in jump in Freeview usage but digital recording is also growing much faster than 3G; 3G usage was at 7% back in 2005. By starting with a slow service and a walled garden 3 has lost what could have been total market domination and Orange, T-Mobile, O2 and Vodafone together now have as many 3G users as 3 does. All the networks will be offering faster services this year, with higher-speed HSDPA and the first rollouts of HSUPA, so sending your phone pictures to Flickr or Facebook won’t take as long. And there are more 3G adapters - USB and ExpressCard as well as PC Card, plus a slew of new notebooks with 3G built in, so you can get online with a device that uses the extra speed for more than downloading ringtones.

The problem is, if the networks don’t increase the backhaul connection - the amount of bandwidth available to each cell - you won’t notice the extra speed unless you’re the only person connected in your area. That means that using 3G is still frustrating at times - and a PVR manages to remove a lot of frustration.

Expect more discussion about TV advertising, licence fees, the ‘unspoken contract’ to watch the ads and other fretting about what TV would cost without advertising. Because 78% of people say they use their PVR to skip the ad breaks and that’s often seen as a bad thing. Changing the channel or leaving the room - which is what Microsoft’s TV researchers found people do when they can’t skip the ads - is even worse, because you’re not going to see the occasional advert that catches your eye and is so good you watch it four or five times. The Sony Bravia ads and the happiness factory inside the Coke machine are good enough to rewind and enjoy; they’re also pretty unusual.

We’d watch more ads if they were interesting and useful. We’d use 3G more if it was faster, cheaper and less restricted. What the mobile operators need - and the iPhone promises but doesn’t deliver - is a PVR for the Internet. Something that tells us what’s available so we can pick what we’re going to want and gets it where we want and when we want. 3G and PVRs are both about instant gratification; get that right and they’ll both keep growing.
-Mary

Google’s latest version of its Earth mapping tool adds a significant new feature; Sky. It’s a great tool, you can scroll around the heavens, zooming in for detailed Hubble shots of the most beautiful astronomical objects, and all for free…

That’s great for us, but a terrible thing for all the small software houses and software developers who’ve invested their lives in developing planetarium software. Astronomical applications have been a profitable niche for a large number of companies, and sophisticated sky explorers have been developed over a number of years. Now, overnight, that market has been blown away.

Google doesn’t need to worry about how much it costs to create and market software. Flush with billions of advertising dollars it can create tools like Sky, and throw them over the wall for free - a loss leader to attract users to the profitable shores of advertising. There’s no thought to the collateral damage - and no thought to the livelihoods that are being ripped apart. Sky may not be as good as the competition, but it’s good enough, and it’s free.

That’s the big problem. Most people don’t want the best, they just want something that does most of what they want in an easy to use package. The Model T Ford trampled a hundred smaller car companies, and pushed highly efficient steam cars out of the way. If the Stanley Steamer had survived, we’d be in a very different world. The same is true of the IBM PC and the myriad smaller PC companies that vanished, leaving us with the Intel/Microsoft monoculture (a tool that Google is leveraging to spread its influence across the rest of the IT industry).

Like the Spanish in meso-America, the Google behemoth has begun to colonise another continent. Like the Spanish, it’s about to wipe out a flourishing civilisation - and not notice a thing. It’s time to raise a glass to applications like Red Shift. We won’t see their like again.

–Simon

Wireless needs work. We used to stream video from our 2Tb Buffalo NAS drive direct to the Media Center PC over 802.11g Wi-Fi quite happily but as more and more neighbours put in their own wireless we were switching channels more and more often. Not on the TV, on the wireless access point. Eventually things got so bad that we gave up and pulled out the extra-long drill bit and dropped a gigabit Ethernet cable through the office wall instead. When I was testing the HTC Touch recently I found the frequent popups asking if I wanted to use some random access point belong to a neighbour infuriating.

The Wi-Fi spectrum is crowded and often over-crowded. That’s annoying enough at home but it can be a real problem for a business . And if you’re relying on a wireless hotspot to get some work done on the road, will you manage to get connected to the access point you’re paying for? You may not have any more control over your airspace as a business, but you do have the tools to find out what’s going on.

When The Cloud recently set up a Wi-Fi network covering the whole of the City of London (which is a lot smaller than the whole of London, of course), lamp posts and street signs were pressed into service to hold access points to give sufficient coverage. The Cloud also used AirMagnet’s network mapping tools to check the signal strength across the network.

The free NetStumbler utility does an excellent job of helping you put your home access point in the best place, but for a commercial installation AirMagnet’s Survey Planner takes RF signal stregth and CAD files to help you map things out in advance and Laptop Analyzer is a good way to get a clear picture of what your wireless really offers one you have it.

In the case of The Cloud, the coverage is pretty good. From the maps - where green is better than yellow - it looks as if you should get a reasonable connection most places, especially around the Gherkin or sitting in Finsbury Circle.

-Mary

Last night I chaired a discussion at the second anniversary Girl Geek dinner: women in technology - breaking down the barriers. As well as Sarah Blow - a software engineer who founded Girl Geek Dinners when she found she was the only woman at a Geek Dinner - we had Jen Langdon, head of engineering at Openads, Paul Foster, a Microsoft evangelist, Galya Holden, Web Services Director for Centaur and Claire Meakin, a maths teacher from Cornwall.

As the room was packed with girl geeks, we skipped right over the questions of whether women belong in IT at all and what they add that men don’t until we got to the discussion about different styles in meetings. I’ve noticed that the time I spend with geeks is pretty relaxing because the social niceties and turn taking and effort to make sure everyone is included just slip away; you get to be heard if you’re interesting instead of if it’s your turn or your ranking in some mysterious social hierarchy is high enough. Do that often enough and your social skills can get a little rusty; you find you stop making the effort to include everyone in meetings and start writing job descriptions as a wishlist full of phrases like ‘challenging environment’.

If you’re looking for a job, you should come to the Girl Geek Dinners (men need to be invited by a woman) - at least four people were recruiting last night. But most of them said they couldn’t find any female applicants. If you’re looking to get more women to apply, beware of a wishlist in the job description; if a woman doesn’t have at least 80% of the skills required - including the ones you put down as desirable rather than necessary - she won’t apply. Men with far fewer skills will apply for a position women are assuming they’re underqualified for.

In the same way, men are more likely to ask for a pay rise. Which leads to a point that got a lot of debate; if women have a different approach that isn’t succeeding as well in a male dominated industry, who should change? Should women become more confident, more pushy and more demanding - or should the industry change to accommodate different styles?
 -Mary

You’re photocopying the salary list for the next round of bonuses, because it’s too much work to retype it and if you send it to the office printer someone might see the printout before you get there. Shame you forgot to take the original out of the copier…

I’ve got some great information from documents left in copiers over the years. Shared scanners are the same; people walk over, put in the document to scan, go back to the PC to start the scan - and never get round to the walking backbit . That won’t be happening in our office any more since we put in the new Lexmark X4550 wireless printer scanner copier. Part of the new budget range (the MFP is around £90 and the inkjet-only Z1420 is around £60), it’s designed for the home or small office and won’t be winning any awards for speed - but it gets the gold star for convenience. Setup is straightforward and there’s a light on the front to tell you that the wireless connection is working, next to a collection of memory card slots. Because it’s wireless you can put it anywhere - even in a different room. If you’re printing letters and forms, you might want to do it from a laptop on the sofa and have them turn up on the kitchen table; or you might not want to sacrifice space on your desk for a printer that could fit on a shelf. And because it’s wireless you can share it without needing a print server adapter (or indeed a server).

And it has push scanning. Open the application you want to scan into, take your photo or document over to the scanner and you can drive the whole thing from the front panel, picking your PC and your application from the display - and taking the document back with you instead of shuttling back and forth to kick of the scan.

For a larger business the X4550 is probably underpowered and although it works with encrypted Wi-Fi quite happily you’ll probably want more security. And rather than buying all new hardware, you can use eCopy to turn your photocopiers into scanners - again, you can send the scan to a PC or into a document management system, by email or fax.

This is more about the process that printing and scanning is part of than about any whizzy technology - and another one for my list of technology that does the scutwork for me instead of having a puny human filling in the gaps in the system.

Nearly every business still has paper systems - forms to fill in or sign that parallel the electronic orders and workflow systems. And when you have to wait for a form to turn up in internal mail - or worse still, from a partner or customer via snail mail (or is that strike mail) to go with the email that’s been sitting in your inbox all day, it’s time to speed paper up a little. Centralised document scanning is efficient but it’s expensive. If you’ve got a form it’s going to be copied or faxed at some point; scan it into the document management system at the same time and job done. Have confidential documents? (Show me a business that doesn’t.) Look for a printer that holds on to the print job until you walk over and type in a PIN. Handy side effect; you won’t be in the queue behind the person printing out 10 copies of a 50-page document.

And back in our office, the Lexmark might not be the highest quality or fastest printer you can get for the money, but it’s good enough and fast enough for a small office - and it’s definitely one of the most convenient.
-Mary

Dell and Lenovo have recently announced that they’ll put Linux on a laptop for you, if you want it. Is this a sign that Linux has arrived? If you count ’somewhere behind Macs’ as arrived, maybe.
Check out the statistics from the logs at the popular W3schools site (check out the Web design tutorials while you’re there). This is a site with over 9.5 million visitors a month, from a wide range of countries: http://www.w3schools.com/about/about_pagehits.asp. And it lists the percentage of visitors not just by browser but also by operating system: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp.

The Mac numbers have been creeping up steadily, about 0.1% every other month since March 2003 (when the figures start) - from 1.8% to 4% in June 2007 (with a long stay at 3.6% for most of 2006).

Linux was doing much the same - similar figures, similar growth - until the middle of 2005 when it peaked at 3.5%, dropped back to 3.3% and stuck in that band. That’s two years of no growth at all for Linux on the desktop, where it’s supposedly the next big thing. For June the figure was 3.4%, compared to 4% for Mac visitors - and 3% for Vista visitors.

There are no Vista figures before January and the consumer launch, but the new OS started at 0.6%, jumped five-fold by April and is showing three months of 0.2% growth. Windows 98% is still hanging on grimly at just under 1% (down from 5% back at the beginning of 2005). Windows XP is still the main contender; it peaked at 76% in January this year and isn’t fading away, but Windows 2000 has been dropping steadily and is down to 6.2%. And server admins don’t surf from the server much (which is a good thing); the Windows Server 2003 visitors are static at around 2%.

The Vista growth looks like new machines as well as upgrades from XP and 2000 - only 0.1% of it is from Windows 98 users (which is just 9,500 people).

The 285,000 Vista users, 323,000 Linux users and 380,000 Mac users visiting W3schools in June don’t account for all the OS sales and upgrades, but they’re probably a fairly representative sample.  The figures don’t go back far enough to show the growth of Windows XP in the first six months, but they do bear out what Bill Gates claimed at WinHEC this year - that Vista alone is doing as well as Mac or Linux. Dell and Lenovo won’t be tearing up their OEM agreements with Microsoft just yet.

And if you think this is unrepresentative of the real success of desktop Linux, please - point me at some statistics that tell a different story.
-Mary

All the time management systems revolve around putting things in the right place and not spending too much time doing it. Easier said than done with the primitive filing options in Outlook - opening up the right folder in the tree and dragging to just the right three pixels on screen is such a drag - and categorising and filtering can get pretty complicated. Enter one of my favourite utilities, SpeedFiler (http://www.claritude.com/).

This is a simple tool; all it does is file email, as you send it or as you read it. The clever thing is that it does it from the keyboard; press the Ctrl-Shift-V shortcut that usually moves message in Outlook and you get the SpeedFiler dialog instead. Start typing the name of the folder - you’ll usually get to it in two or three letters - then hit Enter to file the message. The latest version is psychic; it scans the message, looks to see where you’ve filed this kind of message in the past and suggests that first.

You can type a new folder name or click the tabs to see recent folders or matching folders but you’ll hardly ever need to. if you do have to type a folder name SpeedFiler filters the folders as you go, so you can arrow down to the one you want - also handy for reminding you that you called a folder Shopping rather than Buying before you type the whole word wrong. Again it does a little mind reading -or rather it looks at how many times you wanted IT Pro and how many times you wanted Project Deadlines when you started typing ‘pro’. Don’t bother selecting the input field either - just start typing when you see the dialog.

And if you’re replying to a message SpeedFiler will put that in the same folder for you - it’s a checkbox so you get the choice, but it gets your inbox clean very quickly. You can also send a message and get SpeedFiler to delete it once it’s gone - ideal for forwarding messages without cluttering up your Sent Items folder.

If you don’t like seeing a dialog box when you send a mail you can pick the folder to file in from the SpeedFiler toolbar before you click Send.

You can use SpeedFiler to jump to folders instead of selecting them in the tree; I haven’t really got used to do it that but I think it would save me a few seconds every time. But just by putting my email away for me, SpeedFiler saves a huge amount of time. I used to have to spend a day triaging the mail I hadn’t got around to each month; now I don’t. I was a big fan of the previous version, and it’s still running on the spare laptop (my faithful old Portégé R100) but what used to feel like a huge timesaver feels slow and awkward next to the new version. I’m always saying that computers have access to so much information about what we do that they ought to be able to do more of the scutwork for us - and that’s exactly what SpeedFiler 2 does.

SpeedFiler is excellent value; if you like the look of it use the code SF520BL to get $5 off the price until August 20th and it’s even better value. Use it alongside SNARF to get your inbox under control. It could even give you enough time to stay up to date with all those FaceBook invitations.
-Mary

I’ve been having a little trouble moving some key software from one mobile phone to another.

After upgrading my trusty SPV M3100 to Windows Mobile 6 (don’t ask, and I won’t tell where the ROM came from), I decided it was time to finally retire the HP iPaq 6915 that I’ve been using for the year or so. Most of the applications I wanted to move from one device to the other were sat on my desktop ready to install - after all, you really need a game of NetHack when dealing with the District Line.

The one problem was the GPS software I was using. I’ve got a Bluetooth GPS puck in the car, which lets me use any of the various GPS tools and devices that pass through our office. I’d become a big fan of the CoPilot GPS software - it’s easy to use, and has some of the best mapping information around. So I figured, I’d just copy it across the the newer device.

One of my usual tricks with a smartphone is to store any applications I install on a microSD (or miniSD) card, so I could just copy the files from the iPaq’s card to the SPV’s. That went well (as long as I remembered to swap the cards in the card reader). It wasn’t long before I was ready to fire up the GPS software for the first time.

Then I saw the dreaded words: “Please Activate This Software”.

So I did. Unfortunately the licensing server up the cloud wasn’t going to let me activate the software until I deactivated it on the iPaq. One license: one installation.

Fair enough. So I ran the deactivation process, which required me to take a deactivation code from the phone and type it into the ALK web site along with the license key from the CD. It took me a while to find the CD, but when I filled in the web form, the site crashed. I tried a couple more times, but the service stayed down…

I wrote down the deactivation code and hoped the site would be back today. After all, I had three days grace before the GPS software would time out.

I tried again first thing this morning. The site was back, but the code that had been generated yesterday wasn’t working today. This meant I had to first find the old phone, and then reactivate the software on it. Once I’d done that, then I could deactivate it, and then finally activate the software on my new phone.

I can understand why ALK have built things this way. However, it’s when things go wrong that the underlying fragility of a system comes to light. Using a time stamp as a hash when creating deactivation codes makes sense when trying to ensure that software isn’t accidentally deactivated. However, tying that in to a code lifespan is a problem - as it means that if there’s a problem with the web service that handles the activation/deactivation.

Of course the real problem comes in when a piece of software is abandoned. Will the activation server stay online, or is there somewhere a generic code that will deactivate and activate all copies of the software?

Have you designed this into your activation service?

–Simon

I’ll hold my hand up and admit it. I thought the BBC iPlayer was going to be a good idea. I wasn’t too fussed about the DRM - the regulatory environment the BBC has to work with wouldn’t have let it do anything else. All I wanted was a way to watch my favourite shows on a laptop halfway over the Atlantic.

I got on the the beta last week, along with pretty much everyone who’d signed up. I should have given up as soon as I got the convoluted installation instructions in my email. Go to this site, enter this password, download this application, go back to download a program, install an ActiveX control, start again, and then wait for the slowest P2P download ever to deliver a copy of Top Gear to my hard disk. Oh, and then not to get the right licenses so I couldn’t actually watch the programme I’d downloaded. No Jeremy and No Star in  Moderately Priced Car for me…

That wasn’t an auspicious start. Especially not with the sharks already in the water, and the BBC bleeding badly from its Windows XP-only stance. There’s been an API complete version of Vista out for more than a year now, so I can’t see why they haven’t been able to test against it… And then there’s my bedroom iBook left out in the cold.

So what other mistakes have they made? For one thing the iPlayer is using the same P2P distribution tool as both Sky and Channel 4. Want to have them all running on your Media Centre PC? Sorry - no can do! It’s the iPlayer or nothing else… We’ll gloss over the fact that the BBC isn’t telling people that they have to use a separate uninstaller to get rid of the P2P software (or even that the BBC will be using your bandwidth to share files).

Media Centre PCs are rapidly becoming the home PC of choice, and if the BBC is committed to going the Microsoft route it’s surprising that there’s no Media Centre plugin for the iPlayer. It’s not hard to make another Media Player skin, and link into the Media Centre menus. Even Sky has managed to do it…

So what should the Beeb have done? If they’d wanted to deliver a DRM cross-platform solution then waiting a little while longer would have been the best thing to do. Then its Flash coders could have been used to build a BBC skin for the upcoming Adobe Media Player. FLV files are ideal for pushing around the web, and there are plenty of media server tools that can push out FLV streams or deliver FLV over HTTP. You could even use some form of Bittorrent derivative to push files around (the P2P platform used by both Skype and Joost would work quite well).

Adobe Media Player is a rather nifty piece of code - it brings all the features of sites like YouTube into an application like iTunes, and builds it on top of the familiar (and near ubiquitous) Flash Player. Packaged as an AIR application, it’s small and easy to distribute - and can be skinned using Flash. I know Adobe would be very happy to work with the BBC to deliver an iPlayer based on AMP - and I know a lot of people who would be a lot happier with that sort of solution than the half-baked, half-tested beta we’ve been given.

It’s not as if Adobe is the only game in town. The Participatory Culture Foundation is about to launch Miro, a generic web video player. It’s open source, and builds on the excellent VLC cross-platform player. It probably would be harder to add DRM to Miro, but it’s a tool that’s already mature, and has been designed to do much of what the iPlayer does.

Sorry Jeremy, it looks like I’m going to have to stick with recording you on my Sky box and then stream you around the house with a Slingbox. At least that way I’ll get to watch you in bed, if not on a 747. And there are always ways around that problem…

–Simon