Real Lies - Dab Housing Benji Boko - No.1 Sound - Beta Hector Remix - feat. Ricky Rankin Brother culture - Sound Killer Half Man Half Buscuit - National Shite day - if only for the lyric “A man with a mullet went mad with a mallet in Millets”. You could build a great passphrase generator from HMHB lyrics. Spotify link
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OpenStreetMap as infrastructure - a localgov map?
The Moabi project is reusing the tools of the OpenStreetMap project to map natural resource use in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is an example of what Mikel Maron (from the Moabi project) and Elizabeth McCartney (from the US Geological Survey) called ‘OpenStreetMap as Infrastructure’ in their recent talk at State of the Map US ie taking the OpenStreetMap tool-chain and applying them to new problems.
I got to experiment with some of the OpenStreetMap tool-chain at bit during recent work at the Land Registry and, now in its 10th year, the OSM tools are really impressive:
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Info-buildings
Image derived from (cc) martin allen
Lambeth Council are asking residents with digital skills to help them improve the services they provide. As part of this, that they are holding a hack evening (which, annoyingly, I can’t make, hence this blog post).
One of the challenges is:
how can we make it easier for people to engage with the council in decision making online, particularly those who aren’t that comfortable using the internet?
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Music notes: August 2014
Baxter Dury - Pleasure. Walking south towards Bedlam? Original members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at Glastonbury. I was at this and it wasn’t being pro-filmed, so I assume this is from a bunch of fans with GoPros. The Human League - 4JG, from The Golden Hour of the Future. Cristobal Tapia de Veer - Utopia Finale
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MOO.COM UX rules - circa 2008
I wrote these up just before I left MOO I think.
== General principals ==
=== Optimise for the common case ===
Adding something to satisfy the needs of a small number of users confuses the rest. The tools we build should satisfy the needs of the majority of users.
=== Build tools that on meeting one simple need ===
Tools should focus on solving one problem e.g. “Signing up for a newsletter”, “Previewing a pack”.
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A recipe for starting & prototyping new projects
1) Know your history. Whatever you are making, someone will have done it before, using the tools and thinking of their time.
Start with Wikipedia and work out from there. If the Wikipedia page doesn’t exist, create it. Search for old literature and design assets. Be on the look out for useful quotes and concepts.
2) Read the legislation. Read the legislation.
Even if it’s long and boring, read it all.
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Notes - elements and self hosting
The BBC World Service series Elements uses the elements of the periodic table to look at the world economy. Well worth a listen. Ark OS goes into beta and owncloud hits version 7. Self hosting is growing up.
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Where are the dedicated writing devices?
For some reason, I seem to be thinking a lot about input at the moment.
Something specifically that feels lacking - dedicated, internet enabled, writing devices.
A reverse Kindle.
How long before you can buy a Ghost or Wordpress device that is just a keyboard, small display and a big publish button? Will they be open, or a new way people get locked into a platform like Medium?
The image above is of an [AlphaSmart Neo])(https://en.
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Cards
Who has done this before? Who are your users? What are their needs? What is the right metaphor? What tools do you need as a team? What does the law say? What new technology means you can solve the problem better? How will you test the concept quickly? Can you draw it?
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Cucumber tests for regulatory data?
This is a write up of an idea that came out of the Environment Agency hackday.
How do we know software is working?
We can run the software and look out for bugs. For an open-source project, we can inspect the code.
We can also write and run automated tests against the software, so if it’s broken we know. Something like this:
GIVEN a user is logged in WHEN they click on the 'my account' link THEN they can view their billing history That example is written in a format called Cucumber or Gerkin syntax.
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Notes: 2034, OSM mapping, triangulation
Programming Perl in 2034 by Charlie Stross is just brilliant - he covers what causes things to change, to stay the same and the reality distorting change the awaits us in the coming decades (and the place of programming languages in 100 years time). The whole thing is quotable, but this about sums it up:
“we can reasonably assume that any object more durable than a bar of soap and with a retail value of over $5 probably has as much computing power as your laptop today”
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Local government
Sarah Prag has written a great shopping list of things a ‘GDS for local government’ might need, and points out that some would be controversial.
Part of the reason some might be controversial is because, I think, there are some seemingly contradictory problems that need addressing.
Rather than offering my own view on what a ‘local GDS’ should be, I thought I’d have a go at stating what the I hard things are, in the hope it makes evaluating the shopping a bit easier.
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Timeless
We went to see Goldie’s Timeless end-to-end at the Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown Festival on Saturday. Live drums, live vocals. Amazing.
They could have got away with so little, but instead it was obviously brilliantly planned, executed and performed brilliantly. Including an obviously health and safety approved (there were goggles and extra safety glass - someone put the time in filling forms) smashing of glass into a miked-up steel rubbish bin.
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Anatomy of a project space
Download larger version to print
Checklist Team Team room * Sprint planning room (co-joined)* Fast Internet connection User needs Principles Drawing of service Sprint wall x 2 (A & B) Story wall Screens x 2+ (for demos / information radiators) Email group Git repository IRC/chat room Wiki/note-sharing * Both with whiteboard walls
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Manuals (XKCD) and manuals (VW Beetle).
Time to start understanding more than just the superficial about cryptography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
Databases for lazy people
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Input
5 tiles is a brilliant example of designing from 1st principles.
It is an android keyboard, designed specifically for touch-screens to keep the screen free for content. I’m slowly beginning to pick it up.
I guess it’s similar to the sort of one -handed keyboards used by divers.
It is a very different proposition from Google’s keyboard or Swiftkey which try and learn about you and predict what you are typing using your data.
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Moving from Gmail
I finally got around to moving my email from Gmail to Fastmail. It’s been churning away moving over 8 years worth of emails for over 24 hours now.
First, that meant sorting out my domain name. It was with namesco, who don’t support two-factor auth which no longer feels like an acceptable risk for something that has defacto access to your email.
I moved it to iwantmyname.com. All very easy.
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Notes: Capital Ring, habitat
Completed the Capital Ring. Last 3 stages were a bit epic - about 19 miles in one day. Nearly walked into a deer.
The Capital Ring is well worth the effort, but there’s a total lack of good online information about it. It’s crying out for a dedicated wiki of tips, being able to link to each stage, open GPX tracks.
Off work this week, mostly working on habitat. I now have a working example client for posting location data, and for editing scenarios.
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Notes: 5 - 9th May 2014
Walked stages 9 and 8 of the Capital Ring South Kenton to Osterly (3 more to go).
Final show and tell of the Land Registry concept.
More work on habitat - a personal, programable datastore (or that’s what it is untill I have a better desceiption). I got oAuth working using Flask oAuthLib. So you can now allow clients types of access to specific resources.
Julian was down from Liverpool, so took him to visit South London Makerspace.
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