follicle²

This is not a new track, but I wanted to test the automatic media player thing in Posterous.  And it's a good track anyway. Listen and be amazed (or not) at my skills on bass.  Hint: all the guitars you hear are done on a bass, even the bit at the end. But, Peter Hook I am not.

For your edification, Servolex is part of the name of a satellite town of Chambéry in Savoie, France, where we spent a month in 2005. The town's full name is La Motte-Servolex. We walked there one day from the centre of Chambéry, for something to do. Unfortunately, it's uninspiring in a modern, functional way, so we turned around and walked back. It's a place where not even the residents can be bothered to write anything about it on Wikipedia¹.

Servolex

Ed: No, it seems it won't automatically replace this with a player, I need to actually email the file to the blog. Which I'm not planning to do. Just click it on and it should pop up whichever default player your browser is set up with. Sigh.

By the way, there is much more music at the Dr Dr Aardvark site.

1. It turns out that they prefer to wax lyrical on their communein French. Trés bien, mes amis.

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Everyone loves a list. I was looking at the TIOBE programming languages list for 2008 with some level of discomfort, thinking I was more out of touch than even I had thought, and scratching my head at the kids of today. I mean, D? And ABAP, Pascal, and Logo? But a bit of Googling showed up the community disquiet at the methodology underlying the list, which made me feel better.  It pointed to a competitive list, the Language Usage Indicators, that had a (IMHO) more sensible top 20 that better sat with my own observations.

Even that list surprises me a little; the assertion that "Assembly" still gets a good workout makes me smile, and then wistfully remember long hours hand-assembling Z80 programs in 16K of RAM, and entering and debugging it with a hex editor. Tell that to the young web jockeys of today with their context-sensitive IDEs and GB of RAM. But even I defer to the PDP-8 programmers entering boot code by rocker switches in octal.

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Having had an iPhone for a couple of months now, it does everything I'd imagined, and there are still new apps coming out that take it even further.  In keeping with the form factor, a major limitation is the keyboard (and the missing copy/cut/paste functionality).  Someone has already hacked a Bluetooth keyboard, but I can imagine a compact Bluetooth keyboard+screen device, similar to the stillborn Palm Foleo, that let's you type a bit more seriously.  It would also open up the scope for iPhone apps that allow more capable document or presentation editing.  Something very slim, with a minimum of external connections, probably power (to recharge the batteries), and maybe USB 2.0 for a mouse. How slim and light could that be, I wonder?  Something you could pull out of your bag when you have space and time to sit and edit stuff (airport, plane, cafe, hotel lobby...).

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I was going to do a long blog post about my approach to personal productivity, but others have already devoted many blog-kilometres to that. I apply the Getting Things Done (GTD) concepts where I can, in terms of the philosophy and some of the processes. It's not always as effective as I'd like, and I continue to search for a personal system (processes + tools) that improves my lot. One has to be careful not to become the armchair expert in productivity, or obsess about your processes or tools, without actually achieving anything, but it's an itch I still like to scratch from time to time.

My biggest problems are volume, multiple inputs, and tools.  My global, geographically-dispersed IT company runs on email, and I'm typically receiving 60-70 a day, and sending maybe two-thirds that number. Being off-line or in a long meeting is stressful in itself because you know how much is backing up in the in-box.  I use an automated email filter to separate those I'm only copied on into a @cc folder, and I have other filters to colour-code the remaining ones.  I work hard to get my inbox down to zero, using the 4 Ds (do, delegate, defer or delete) and forward items to folders called @Action, @ReadReview, and @WaitingOn (à la GTD), or just archive into their appropriate resting place in a local folder. I can access the online folders from my smartphone, a convenience that has its pros and cons, but it generally helps.

Having multiple sources of todo items is a fact of life: from emails, conversations, documents, meetings, thoughts.  Capturing and manipulating them can be a drag. My todo list tool of choice is SimpleGTD, mainly because it lives up to the promise. It's not perfect, a little slow at times, and not very accessible from mobile devices, but I'm rarely away from a laptop at work or at home, when I need to check it. And it's free.  I dump just about every action in there, as my central repository, but the lists can get big and important things can get buried from time to time. 

One of the absolutely essential practices of GTD to combat this is the Weekly Review, and this I find the hardest thing to do, simply because of the uninterrupted time it requires to do properly.  With a large number of simultaneous projects (remember, by GTD definition, this is anything with more than a couple of sequential actions), trawling through these and working out the Next Actions is a major activity, and hard to stay focused on.  I've learned not to try and manage a multitude of micro-projects, but group actions under broader topics like People, Financials, Resources etc. It's not as neat as I'd like, but trades off speed.

My latest pick-up is the Zen To Done (ZTD) tip of deciding at the start of each day on 2-3 Most Important Things (MITs), and making sure that you give them some focus during the day.  Write them somewhere prominently. More strategically, think about the Big Rocks for the week that you want to work on, and plan around.

So, it was a long blog post about my approach to personal productivity after all.

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Very amateur photographer that I am, at the recommendation from a photography book, I decided to look at some of my more recent photos and identify the dominant design element in each photo out of the list:

1. Line
2. Shape
3. Form
4. Texture
5. Pattern
6. Colour

Interestingly, out of the 50-odd photos that I classified, I could quickly see that the more under-represented ones were Form and Colour. Form is about capturing the three dimensions of the subject, such as depth or volume, through the use of light and shadow, side-lighting, depth of focus and so on.Colour is mostly about an emotional response to colour, either as variations in a single hue, or contrasts and interactions between colour of different hues.

One of my 2009 resolutions then is to improve my photography skills by more consciously addressing one or more design elements in each shot, in particular the under-represented ones.  And asking myself before taking a shot what it is that I'm attempting to capture in the field of view, and making sure there is a focus to it, in terms of compositional variables, like the framing, orientation, focus, depth of field, exposure, camera location and so on. When you have a camera in your hand you see the world differently.

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In their book " The Ethics of What We Eat", authors Peter Singer and Jim Mason cover a lot of ground in their discussion of balancing our needs and wants for food with the impacts on others. To help guide suggestions on what we should be eating, at the end of the book they outline five ethical principles that they think most people will share.

1. Transparency: we have a right to know how our food is produced.
2. Fairness: producing food should not impose unfair costs on others.
3. Humanity: inflicting significant suffering on animals for minor reasons is wrong.
4. Social responsibility: workers should have decent wages and working conditions.
5. Needs: preserving life and health justifies more than other desires.

Based on this, they then look at the main classes of food and determine how well they adhere to these principles. Sadly, little of our supermarket food lives up to these principles. They point out that:

In supermarkets and ordinary grocery stores, you should assume that all food -- unless specifically labelled otherwise -- comes from the mainstream food industry and has not been produced in a manner that is humane, sustainable, or environmentally friendly. Animal products, in particular, will virtually all be from factory farms unless the package clearly states the contrary.

Remember that it's not in food producers' interests for us to know how our food is produced.

With all the potential impacts that food has -- on slave labour, animal exploitation, land degradation, wetland pollution, rural depopulation, unfair trade practices, global warming, and the destruction of rainforests -- you could easily become paralysed, as in a minefield, afraid to make any decisions. Fortunately, Singer and Mason remind us that " ethical thinking can be sensitive to circumstances". You need to weigh up your own interests in food choices, but don't outweigh the major interests of others affected by your choices. 

It's all about making better choices, and that comes from some knowledge of potential impacts, and of options. Making choices that promote one or more of the five principles above is a positive step.

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When I'm writing music, the first soft synth I usually go for is the free Automat by Alphakanal. I've been a bit slow in getting to the new version (1.01), but it has even more knobs than before, which is enough to get any synth geek's attention.

Knob quantity aside, this synth has some quality features like three oscillators with internal and external waveforms, each with its own multi-mode filter/shaper; an overall multi-mode filter; three effects; fourteen LFOs, random patch generation, portamento, and more.  And did I mention it's free? 

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The Free42 port to the iPhone is getting closer. Screenshots look nice -- see below . I've never owned an HP-42S but it's my calculator of choice on my laptop and my old Palm, and often regarded as the best HP calculator ever released.  I'm making do with the i41CX for the moment.

Update 12-Jan: It's now available on iTunes.

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An article from McKinsey looking at historical industry data in previous downturns, and an indicator of what will happen in this one.  In IT in particular, they point out that...

During recessions, tech spending has historically fallen more than GDP has. Our research (covering economic downturns in 50 countries over the past 13 years) indicates that IT spending typically fell 5 to 7 times farther than GDP, with the most severe declines in hardware (which fell 8 to 9 times GDP) and less severe ones in software and services (3 to 5 times GDP).

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Future novel iPhone apps.
 
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/16/view/4898/augmented-reality-on-the-iphone.html

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