Digital Apocrypha

A couple of pieces here and here about how laptops and wifi are changing conferences and lectures. For speakers: if you’re lucky, the people in the audience tapping on their laptops are reading your lecture notes or googling around what you’re saying. At worst, they’re IMing ther friends for readin gtheir email.

Ingo Rammer does a good job of explaining why some of the System.Windows.Forms classes are sealed – thus preventing them from being extended by subclassing. The reason is that winforms controls are just wrappers for the underlying Win32 controls, and, in some circumstances, these controls interact directly with eachother using Win32 message passing – without involving their managed wrappers. At best, extending the wrapper will have no effect. At worst, it breaks the control.

Kudos to Ingo for explaining this. I wish I had more time to spend of winforms, but I’m still exploring ASP.NET. Maybe when Chris Sell’s winforms book is published in the Autumn.

Article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about corporate attitudes to employee blogging. Unsurprisingly, it puts a lot of emphasis on Microsoft bloggers, and Scoble in particular.

Dan Gillmor’s blog has a pointer to Google Alert, a web tracking system. Its a nice idea: you give them a search string, which they submit to Google each day on you behalf. You get an email every time the result of the search changes. Or you can get the results by RSS.

Without trying this, its hard to know how well it works. badly crafted search strings would probably generate too many false alerts, so I don’t know how careful you’d have to be. Also, whats the business model? Ads? If I get time, I’ll try it.

Meowlingual is a cool new gadget that decodes cat-speak. Amazing.

Apart from the significant technical challenge in getting this to work as a piece of consumer electronics, it also creates a totally new market sgement: human-animal communication products. If people spend as much money on this stuff as they do on pet care and pet insurance (hint: a lot), or books to improve their own human/human relationships, then this technology will make someone a lot of money.

FastCompany (a site I find I’m reading more and more) has a facinating article on the impact of women on Microsoft’s corporate culture.

As someone who’s worked in the software biz for a while, I’ve seen at first-hand some of the disgraceful treatment of women that seems to be commonplace in the industry. This has ranged from refering to women as “girls” and assuming they were secretaries, to men who openly stated their opinion that women couldn’t do technical work, to (in one case) blatant victimisation and undermining that led to a bright and tallented woman to resign from her job. It’s one of my great professional regrets that I seem destined to spend my career in male-dominated working environments, with all the bullshit and pointless conflict that comes with it.

Anyway, its good to know that at least one organisation can adapt its culture to get the best from its people, without losing its sharpness and (necessary) internal competition.

Last week I read Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs. Today I read this, about “flash crowds” in New York. Very cool – we truly are living in the future already. This is how it will be.

We’ve just got back from a great two-week holiday in southern Spain – which accounts for the absence of any recent blogging activity here… Got back to a huge pile of post, 500+ emails, and the garden had gone wild.

We spent about 2/3 of the time on the Andalucian coast, and the remainder staying in some wonderful villages up in the mountains near Rhonda. The latter part was the real highlight for me: very few tourists, real Spanish food, and wonderful scenery. One morning we even went for a walk high up into the mountains – something we’re both keen to try again next time we’re there.

The photos will be up soon.

I’ve made a couple of fairly major, but not necessarily obvious, changes to the site. First off, all pages now have an .aspx extension instead of the normal .html. (For the benefit of the 99.9% majority of the population, a .aspx extension means that the page uses Active Server Pages .NET). A side-effect of this change is that, until Google hits the site again and updates its index, the site search box in the navigation bar is going to return invalid page names. If this happens, just replace the .html extension with .aspx and it should work.

Secondly (and less interesting to most people), the “navigation bar” on the site of each page is now implemented as a database-driven ASP.NET web control, written by yours truly. With CityDesk‘s habit of mangling my HTML tags, editing the navigation bar was just getting impossible. Now, though, I can just modify the database and the changes show-up automatically. The control does custom data caching, so, although there’s a slight delay on the first page view, it seems pretty snappy after that. Anyway, enjoy!

Heh heh heh… this is good. Fill in a form to describe how you’d like Julie Burchill to meet her end, hit the button, and you get a mock BBC news page reporting the story. As well as being quite nice for us Grauniad readers, its also quite clever. Somehow, it grabs the current front page from the BBC’s site, snips out the top story, and inserts the fake one. I wonder what will happen when the beeb’s lawyers find out about this? #

Cyveillance – a slightly creepy-sounding e-business intelligence outfit. “Minding your business on the net” indeed.