Ideas 'n stuff

Having a weird few days of doing prototyping, brainstorming, experimenting and thinking and talking with cool people in Manchester and Glasgow, and today, though I am a little sore headed and tired, the hangover seems to be distilling some cracking ideas.

So, in an effort to estanblish 'prior art' ona few things, here are this mornings top ideas:

Arduino breakout sheild built into a notebook cover.

I've got this recycled pcb notebook, but wouldn't it be great if I could plug an arduino into it and use it as a giant breadboard, with LCD matrix and other stuff built in. Pages from the notebook could be used like the Oomlout breadboard overlays. This is a cracking idea, and we could just build it!





Wood Lathe app on the iPhone.
Use the accelerometer to drive the bit into the wood as is spins, the vibrator to give a feel for the bite. Choose woods, make designs, trade your turnings. Have the screen fill up with wood dust so you have to shake and blow it off. It's all nice, it's a delight. You can take it to a meeting and legitimately call it a workshop.

Other great things I have learned this week:
Only two tube stations contain no letters from the word Mackerel (AHA! No correction- there is no "Bow" station- so there's only ONE!)
The longest word you can make from the top row of a qwerty keyboard is 'typewriter'
The international space station runs on GMT

Last Day at KW

After 60 years my dept is quitting it's historical, hysterical head quarters- the much vaunted, dodgily vaulted Kingswood Warren. And today is my last day on site. There's a mix of emotions here- actually rather a strong mix due to some very sad news we heard this morning, which I shan't go into here. Relating to the move though, one can't help imagining one hears snatches of Elgar's "Nimrod" echoing down the halls.



As a place to work, KW (as it's known to it's denizens) has charms and quirks a plenty. Huge spaces purpose built to shoot and show films, and converted decades ago to demonstrate television. Grand meeting suites with oak panels, and bay windows opening onto the croquet lawn. Here too was, for many years, the core of the BBC's onlne presence, built out of the sheer bloodymindedness of our now Cheif Scientist, Brandon Butterworth.



[Edit- I've just had a walk around the old site- and a grumble about the past is not the right send off]



What I won't miss about KW:

• Having no clue what's happening in the rest of the BBC ever.
• Missing lunch by 5 minutes.
• The lingering debilitating depression of the Varney/Highfield era.
• Vile tea and coffee.
• No mobile reception.
• Baking in summer, baking in winter (the central heating pipes liquid magma direct from the earths core to every single room)
• Long tedious deeply depressing conversations about previous senior management in the canteen.
• Empty offices and corridors echoing with the rattle of dismantling equipment.
  

What I will miss.

• The Ceiling in A-Block reception.
• That there's almost always a secret short cut from one place to another (it's great fun to finish a presentation to a room full of invited guests and then disappear through a hidden door!)
  
• Mullioned windows
• Flying rockets on the feild
• Deer and fauns in the morning mist.
• Seeing colleagues knocking mud from the allotments off their boots in the hall
• Long facinating deeply technical conversations about everything from linear induction motors to victorial optical intruments in the canteen.
• Always finding new rooms I never knew existed.
  
• Bowling googlies on the lawn.
• Carols in the snow.
  
• Yoga in the club hut.
• The Canteen Staff- stars one and all.
  

I know I never made the most of this place. I don't know if I could have. It seemed it had been here for ever, and we would never leave, but in an hour, I'm off.


* I joined R&D around the time of this lowest ebb, so much of this is hearsay, and in the interests of legal boilerplating, it can be read as a largely fictionalised account of the past.

CC Attribution to Rainrabbit for the mullioned window pic- one of very many lovely shots of KW from Rain.

Brolly Brilliant

A few years ago I went for a walk, a biggish walk, which I do sometimes do. And I took with me a very excellent umbrella I'd been given by the delightful people at RTE when I did a workshop at the BISA event they hosted. That wooden handled brolly served me proud on my walk in Andalucia, keeping the worst of the sun off me as I tramped up through the Alpujarras, and making a very handy walking pole.


When I got up into the Sierra Nevada peaks proper, above the snow line the brolly kept on working- a decent walking pole now doubled as a stop gap ice axe, and a wind break on exposed ridges as I hunkered down with a few biscuits. It even stood up well as a photo monopod with the Gorilla pod grip for my compact camera.

My trusty brolly did me proud, and I actually rather liked sauntering around BBC facilities with another broadcaster's logo splashed about- it got looks, raised eyebrows. It was cool.

And I left it on a bus in Brighton, sigh.

Still, what this brolly led me to think it that there is a real gap out there. That the last piece of outdoor gear to get properly techno fetishised is the umbrella, and there's a hell of an opportunity there.

Firstly it's a stick. Shock absorbing, adaptable, strong, and extendable- so many options in terms of mechanisms and materials immediately spring to mind- carbon fibre being the obvious first choice.

It needs a handle, shock absorbing, comfortable, ergonomic, possibly including atachments for cameras, and small compartments for storage. And perhaps this handle can convert into an ice axe head?

Then it has a spike, or whatever ending is appropriate for the terrain, with a sleeve to cover the far end/ centre of the canopy and act as a temporary second handle.

And there's the canopy itself- this is already water and windproof, but we can go further, and ensure it's properly impermeable to UV, and perhaps radio waves too (see later) but just porous enough to act as a large area water filter.

The spokes, always the weak link of an umbrella design, could be so much better made- titanium is the obvious choice, light, strong, springy, it could be structured to give the perfect shape...

The shape- why not a perfect parabola? Imagine the potential benefits of having an accurate parabolic reflector surface on hand in the wilderness to boost mobile phone reception (radio waves!), or to boost the visibility of signalling lights!

I tell yah this has got to be a winner! The Gentlemans Adventure Umbrella! I'd call it 'The Penguin'!

Mean while, these really do float my boat....

Victorinox Automatic Umbrella

The Blunt Umbrella

New Year Quiz

We just played this- have a go and feel free to post answers in comments:

TV
1. Arlene Philips was dumped as a Strictly Judge in favour of Alesha Dixon- what’s their age difference?
a. 25 years
b. 30 years
c. 35 years

2. Shudderingly odious toe rag Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time- how many complaints did the BBC get?
a. 110
b. 340
c. 1040

3. Gail Trimble won, but then was disqualified, from which show?
a. America’s Got Talent
b. University Challenge
c. I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here

Europe
1. Silvio Berlusconi was hit with what?
a. A fist
b. A tiny portable tv
c. A scale model souvenir of Milan Cathedral

2. Where was Roman Polanski arrested?
a. Rome
b. Switzerland
c. L.A.

3. Tony Blair wasn’t made president of Europe, but who was?
a. Angela Merkel
b. Herman Van Rompuy
c. Toad of Toad Hall

Science
1. What was discovered about the sheep on the Scottish Island of Hirta?
a. They swam there from the mainland
b. They’re shrinking because of climate change
c. They have no fear of helicopters

2. There was a total eclipse of the sun over India, Nepal, China, and Japan in which month?
a. April
b. July
c. October

3. The rocket to replace the space shuttle was test launched- what’s it called?
a. Ares?
b. Saturn?
c. Roger?



Film
1. Who said “She’s gotta have tit’s” ?
a. Tom Cruise
b. Mickey Rourke
c. James Cameron

2. What won the best picture Oscar?
a. Milk
b. Slumdog Millionaire
c. Curious Case of Benjamin Button

3. What was the biggest selling film in the UK in 2009?
a. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
b. Slumdog Millionaire
c. Up

Music
1. What living artist sold the most recordings this year?
a. Lady Gaga
b. Beyonce
c. Kings of Leon

2. Who did Kanye West interrupt with his “Imma let you finish” brain fart?
a. Britney Spears
b. Rhianna
c. Taylor Swift

3. Who headlined Glastonbury (Saturday, mainstage, closing act)?
a. Neil Young
b. Blur
c. Bruce Springsteen

Brighton
1. What was White Air 2009?
a. A climate change conference
b. An extreme sports event
c. An art installation on the south downs

2. Who was appointed to be the curator of the Brighton Festival 2010?
a. Simon Fanshaw
b. Anish Kapoor
c. Brian Eno

3. Brighton Rock is to be remade; who is not known to be in the new film’s cast?
a. Dickie Attenborough
b. Helen Mirren
c. Pete Postlethwaite

Breakfast is Best

I'm not a morning person. I owe many thousands of apologies for the growling sneering grumbling snarls I have inflicted on family and friends in the hours around dawn- and those soon after. I am however a tremendous fan of breakfast, probably becuase it's the only thing that can retrieve me from the slough of despond that leaving sleep thrusts upon me.

However, it was only last night, when attending a dinner in honour of an excellent friend (who gave us all a scare earlier this year, and whose birthday is especially precious) it struck me that evening meals are in fact less good than breakfasts. That is to say, a truly great breakfast can be much better than a great dinner. And further, that when I look back on my favourite meals, I can very easily produce a cracking top five breakfasts and still need to make a few explicit special mentions. Breakfasts are great!

The theory is thus: a great dinner, with superb service, excellent ingredients, exquisite presentation and all the rest, is really only ever going to leave me with one sort of feeling- a generally impressed, slightly smug, overstuffed tired indulgence. There just isn't the wiggle room, the option, for it to do anything else. A dinner is, at the end of the day, at the end of the day. You eat, then slump.

A breakfast on the other hand, has a FAR larger canvas to play with; it can set the stage for the whole day, for life itself. If the setting is good, with views and a bit of a breeze, it can be a springboard to adventure. If the service is sprightly, enthusiastic and attentive, your faith in human kind is essentially restored and all the people you meet for the rest of the day benefit, not just you. It goes on- energy, balance, excitment, engagement, all of these can spring from a good breakfast, not to mention the benefits of a goodly helping of fibre.

So, what are the five best breakfasts I've had?

#5 Bacon and Maple Syrup and Pancakes, Angel Inn, Windermere
Not perhaps where you'd expect me to say the best of this sort of dish is to be found, but it is brilliant here. To be honest I've had bacon and pancakes in the US, and usually, they over do it, leaving one reeling into the morning with rather more ballast than is useful. This was spot on though. Setting is a gem too, looking down along the lake.
As a dish I'd long steered clear- bacon + sweet = wrong. But no, it's ace. Especially with a banana milkshake and a coffee.

#4 Masala Omelette, Goa
A simple curried omelette on the beach in Goa, with the salt of the spray just blowing on off the dunes and the morning sun dappling through the palms is a proper start to the day, washed down with a spicy chai.

#3 Eggs Benedict at either the Real Eating Company in Hove or at Bill's in Brighton
Both these places take an almost perverse pleasure in doing simple food incredibly well, and there is nothing to choose between their eggs benedicts- both have the eggs done to perfection, the hollandaise fresh and lush, the muffins lightly toasted just so, and the ham sourced from some valhalla for heroically tasty piggies. Pricey, but devine.

#2 Huevos Rancheros, Argyle Steakhouse, Fourseasons Aviara, Carlasbad CA
Weird venue. Wouldn't really recommend it normally, but it was part of some massive, Cloud City Bespin like complex north of San Diego where I was speaking at a conference, and the main hotel restaurant (which did a superb crab benedict (I know!)) was a bit too full of children to be tollerable. So I wandered down to the golf course for a walk in the morning and found the bar there serving breakfast. So there I sat- only customer there, with a glorious view over the greens being waited on hand and foot and provided with the greatest mexican peasant breakfast imaginable was a delightfully mind boggling way to ease into a day of California corporate excess. And a golf course without golfers is just a nice garden really.


#1 Boogaloo Diner, 22nd & Valencia, San Francisco
This one saved my life- the perfect example of all a breakfast can be- simple, served with genuine care, and beuatifully made. I entered Boogaloo with a hangover a that would have felled a Wildebeast, and left with a spring in my step and a passion for life.


And five honourable mentions:
Hard Mans Breakfast, Hicadua, Sri Lanka
Double espresso and a Rothmans cigarette in a beach bar (sadly later flattended by a tsunami)
Gut Buster, Market Diner, Brighton
Enough saturated fat to run a small powerstation, on a plate bigger than Belgium- Sausages, burger, beans, tomatoes, eggs, hash browns, fried bread, black pudding, the list goes on and on. They have tea on draft too. Fabulous. However, I've never had it for breakfast, only as a stupidly late supper.
nebulous potato thing, St Francis Fountain, 24th & York, San Francisco CA
Very very nearly as good as boogaloo, but a bit busier and more popular. Had a couple of great breakfasts here, thanks to the PWN Depot crew.
An Eagle's Breakfast
Look it up.
Rowan's Welsh Rarebit
Actually better than any of the above, but I thought I'd limit the list the breakfasts that other people might actually be able to get, but I'm afraid unless she embarks on a dramatic and unexpected career change, I and only I have been given the world's best ever breakfast. Lucky me!

Me and My Mo

And so Movember draws to it's long awaited, and yet precipitous close. For four straight weeks I've been growing the most absurd facial hair I have ever considered diplaying, and done so against all manner of insult and accusation. This tache has endured allegations of 'thiness', 'fatness', victorianism, 'Fred Dibnerism' and even, in the end, of making me look like an over fed hamster. It has iched and bothered, strained soup, and tickled, and on occasion, I must admit, has picked up a vaguely cheesy aroma, if not very vigorously and thoroughly washed. I now wash it vigorously and thoroughly. Lots.

And yet, here we are, three days and a couple of public speaking engagements away from being once more clean shaven, and I am beginning to wonder if I won't miss it. The 'Flashman' comparisons are well recieved, and I'll miss the subtle double takes of the general public. 'Yes madam' I inwardly respond, 'this is indeed the finest tache you've seen today!'.

There's still opportunity to go to the Movember page and show your appreciation, or sympathy, by making a contribution to the very decent cause of prostate cancer awareness and research.

Blogging for Auntie

This is by way of an apology and an explanation of why this blog has tended not to get many posts just lately, and yet were you to ask me to my face, I'd tell you I've been blogging like mad. And the reason is- I've launched a new BBC R&D Blog!



Last Wednesday we went live, starting off with a great post from Matthew Postgate, controller of R&D, and since then we have posted on our recent triumphs at the RTS Innovation awards, the Distribution Application Layer research team, and the Ingex project in some detail. We're busly producing loads more posts and the plan is to have at the very least two a week appearing, but ideally rather more than that.

This does take a fair bit of coordination, cajouling and general whip cracking. As I've probably mentioned ad nauseam, the R&D team at Kingswood Warren is relocating early next year, and we're now counting the days (I've lost count, 91 today I think) till we go. That move will be pretty scarey- we have a two week window when both the new base and the old are open! Submitting blog posts is often a fair way down staff members priority list, and fair play to them for that.

Getting posts out at the same time as rebuilding the complete R&D website is proving very time consuming. Hey, it's near enough 1500 pages, it takes a while! Right now our plan is to have a big public hoo har and synch that with the move to Centre House (Feb 15th 2010) but we expect a soft launch some weeks ahead of that. May even let you know here.

Next week I'm up to MCR for BeeBCamp 3 which will be great I'm sure. maybe see a few good friends up there too!

Guardian Triumphant over Carter-Ruck

RT @arusbridger Victory! #CarterRuck caves-in. No #Guardian court hearing. Media can now report Paul Farrelly's PQ about #Trafigura.

It's a good day to tweet.

Guardian vs Carter-Ruck and Trafigura Over Parliamentary Questions

Very very quickly posting this in order to join in with the mass bypassing of what appears to be a vile and heinous miss application of legal restraints over parliamentary reporting. I sincerely hope that Rusbridger and co crucify the shits of Carter-Ruck on appeal (and that the judge involved takes a goodly chunk of gardening leave too, ideally slopping around in this mess).

So what is that the Guradian have been gagged from saying?

(292409) 61 N Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

With thanks to Nevali, Bill Thompson, and slightly grudgingly to Guido Fawkes.

And hoping like hell that every news channel in the country, online and otherwise, covers this like a virulent rash!

EDIT- After having this up live for two years I am now blocking comments on this post.  This is due to concerted attacks by Chinese spammers, either in an effort to counter any allegations against Trafigura or just homing in on a post for commercial ends.  I figure the former.  Well screw you, and screw your paymansters.  You're grubbing away at a pointless effort, and the people paying you are abject fucking scum.  One day you'll get democracy, a free press, the liberties to see the people screwing the worlds people and environment to make a yuan out of your desire to have the shiny toys you think make me and the rest of the west happy.  You can no longer comment on this post.  It's mine.  I've decided that I'll close it.  Don't like that?  Don't like the denial of liberty I'm imposing?  Sorry, perhaps you should vote or protest or something about that.  Perhaps even overthrow the government.  Trust me, it's about time.

IBC Conference and Exhibition Reflections

I may have given a bit of a false start to my IBC coverage this year. Sadly, after the enthusiasm of the first day I found the week long event a rather draining, and truth be told, demoralising experience. It wasn't without highlights though, and I think it's only fair I give a potted account of the best and the worst of the conference and the exhibition.

OK, so, highlights: Eric Huggers keynote was really good- in fact the session was excellent with great insights from IBMs Saul Berman and the hugely entertaining Rory Sutherland of Ogilvey- Rory's speech was a master class in erudite education disguised as a joyful ramble, and the image of a McDonald's drive-through full of half naked gluttons will be with me forever! However, these three luminaries, and their able interlocutor Raymond Snoddy, were among the very few in the exhibition who appeared to be prepared down the barrel of the gun of IP delivered content.

Quick sidebar here- The Canvas demonstrations shown (just a mocked up UI in fact, but ratjer a nice one) by Erik seem to have lit a fire under those in the broadcast market who had hitherto let such ideas slide them by. Now at last, some 3 years after the BBC rolled its sleeves up and started to see how a fully joined up IPTV platform could work, the great and good of european broadcast have started the HBB-TV project. This work is good, but it's late, and though the BBC are facing fair criticism for relying on proprietary components (especially from Adobe) it's perhaps salutary to recognise that this lumbering industrial standards approach from the old guard of european broadcast technology is years behind the reinvigourated BBC approach. Having said all that OFCOM and the BBC Trust may yet mandate that an open standards based approach be taken- who knows how that would turn out!?

Across the conference the best attended sessions tended to be those with the most 'conventional' view of broadcast. This is not to say that 'conventional' is bad- I'm thinking here of the excellent in depth DVB-T2 review gave possibly one of the best insights to the incredible engineering work that's gone into developing the next generation of Freeview in High Definition- that's to say FreeviewHD- and slot it into the Digital Switch Over in UK broadcasting. (For more good introductory guides the EBU stand at IBC was excellent). For all this excellent work though, it is worth considering for a moment what wasn't at IBC....

There was a very modest mobile presence- Qualcom had a big stand, which I thought looked very quiet. Nokia had a modest stand, but Apple weren't there at all. Does that matter? It does when you think of the massive impact the iPhone has had on the way we think of people buying content. App Stores were an unseen buzz all over the show, and to think I actually heard someone, a well respected senior engineer from a major broadcaster, say without a flicker of irony that 'There are no new business models'. That sounded a lot like denial to me. (Not to his fellow panelists, who nodded sagely at this mantra.)

What clearly does matter is that this year Sony saw fit to skip the show entirely- usually they'd have had a stand covering several thousand square metres, showing off displays, cameras, broadcast and domestic kit. Their absence left a gaping hole. I think it also matters that there was no Google, no Twitter, no Yahoo, no Nintendo, no Electronic Arts, no Facebook, no computer games publishers at all. The way I see it IBC is a wake for the dominance of linear broadcast- I'll accept that most living rooms have TVs still, and that most people watch most of their TV linearly, but the days when this was the big picture, and all other forms of electronic media were fringe niches, has finally passed.

I'll go next year, briefly, and I really hope there's more of a realisation evident that TV in it's "lean-back" form is a niche in a bigger world of mobile, internet entertainment, social media, games, online movies. And what's more, that TV is better when it does recognise this- better for its engineers, better for its creatives and most importantly better for its audiences. Signs are not good though- a year ago, my esteemed collegue late of this parish, John Ousby, wrote a similar piece for the BBC internet blog, and I doubt he'd have noticed a great improvement.

Still, Amsterdam was nice.

IBC Conference highlights- day one

Thursday at RAI for IBC, and the programme starts way too early for me to get to see. Shame, session one looked good. Then came the keynote with Roger Mosey looking at advanced ways to present sport. Would have loved to see that too, but at just that moment I got a call for help from a colleague setting up his project on the EBU stand. God project, good chap- had to go help.

What I did get to see included:

• Thomson Grass Valley analysis of noise in HD video- very interesting because it specifically looked at High Frame Rate which the BBC has explored as an alternative to 3D for high fidelity video.
• A presentation from NHK on a new Java based distributed home network model for interactive video based on Broadcast Markup Language (rather looking forward to digging around their stand later in the week).
• A really interesting juxtaposision of the Sony/Sky and BBC approaches to adding 3D graphics into football and rugby coverage (rugby is harder, and only the BBC are doing that right now). The philosophy of the approaches was different, but complementary, and both presentations included great video examples.
• A great map of the mobile marketplace and revenue streams- in such a complex business these sorts of graphical analysis are invaluable! Good work from First Partner!

Right, time I went and mingled- I want to try and get the ball rolling on an IBC UnConference/ barcamp next year. This event so needs it!

To Amsterdam for IBC

OK, just a quicky this one- for the next week or so I'm in Amsterdam attending the largest broadcast technology show in Europe, IBC. I'll be attending as many conference sessions as I humanly can, visiting as much of the show as I can (it's colossal!) and also supporting the Avatar-M stand in Hall 7, stand A08e. This trip marks a sort of a transition- unlike NAB my responsibilities this time are not just to the one project, but to the whole of R&D in the BBC, and I'm going to try my best to find the most interesting, most transformational technologies and companies there to take the knowledge back to colleagues in the UK.

The number of BBC personnel at IBC is a sensitive subject, and I'm not going to state numbers here. However I can say that this year everyone who is going has had to fully justify their attendance, and many, like me, are doing several jobs out there. Plus, most of us are still doing the day job via the internets (I'm typing this on the train from Brussels to Amsterdam!).

Each day as and when I find cool stuff I'll be posting a few links, and hopefully images, on this blog. I'll also tweet from the various conference sessions- possibly as Meeware, or potentially as a new Twitter account I may be setting up for this sort of job- "Ant Miller BBC R&D" or "BBCResearch&Development"- tbc. All part of the KM job you see.

Through this marathon geekout I shall do my best to avoid dwelling on the fact that I am missing out on probably the best festival of the summer- The End of the Road. Terrific line up, perfect size, and it looks like the weather will be spot on too! At least Rowan's going- look out for her updates as @Rowstar and for a full review on Breakfast in Bed.

P.S. If you too are in Amsterdam for IBC (or even just chilling out in what is a superb city), direct message me on twitter or drop me an email, or even comment here, and I'd be glad to catch up.

Summer of Gnnnnr

I'm not taking much of a break this summer- the US jollies Rowan and I went on back in April were our big hols of the year, so the summer has been nose to the grindstone time. The trouble is though that is dashed difficult to get a huge amount done when everyone else is off on their jollies.

This is just a general observation- I've no idea how it gets fixed unless we return to the Victorian era practice of entire towns taking a break for the same week over the summer- Blackpool grew up on this practice, and to this day the town has a distinct atmosphere in the Liverpool week and Glasgow week.

Getting an organisation like the BBC to lock in to this sort of practice hasn't a snowball in hell's chance. Would be nice if just once a week, or even a fortnight, back in 'term time' we had 'office days', where for just one day everyone would be doing their jobs, at their desks, answering phones and emails, not doing any training courses or on team 'away days' or at conferences or on holiday and if at all possible avoiding being ill. I can imagine the productivity would be startling- we could get a months work done in a day.

Meanwhile though I feel like I have spent the summer dragging boulders uphill on my own. Gnnnnr

My laptop is driving me insane

I'm not a designer- I have had the very great pleasure to work with designers, and engineers and scientists, and all are capable of really great things. When a designer gets it wrong though, like an architect, it is a rather more insidious outcome than either an engineer or scientist cocking up. Those last two, when their stuff doesn't work, it just doesn't happen- things, usually just don't get built. (Granted occasionally they do and people die horribly, but that fact doesn't illustrate my point well so I shall arbitrarily ignore it).

On the other hand, when a designer cocks up, they just spread misery. I have recently taken delivery of a new work laptop (another one! yes damnit, I have several laptops, but the aim with this one was to get something small and powerful enough to avoid carting two around (as I have been for months)). So I got what Siemens (don't ask) currently issue to us here at the BBC, and it is this-

The HP Elitebook 2530p.



Sweet looking thing isn't it? I got 3gig of ram and a bigger battery too, and in essential regards it has all the chops I need- good battery life, tough, lightweight, grunty and can draw pictures (driving large monitors is something it gets asked to do a lot, and transcoding video too).

It is however a cluster of niggles. As my darling wife is all too weary of hearing- 'it does annoy'.




Annoyance 1. The little light.
This was, initially, a delight. A little design touch that really pleased.? When one presses the little button next to the webcam, a tiny light pops out and illuminates the keyboard to enable hunt&peck fun in the dark. How sweet! How useful! What an utterly bloody stupid way to solve that problem, and a wasted opportunity at that!


I have big hands. Approximately how many keys are visible when I am poised to hunt and peck? Eleven- rtyu, ghj, and vbnm. Why?- BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE GLASS HANDS! There is an excellent reason why backlit keyboards are considered 'really good ideas'- they light the keys, not the fat fivesomes of sausages that waft above the keys. I don't much care to see the back of my hands at night; I do want to see the keys, SO LIGHT THE BLOODY KEYS!
Then, they take this tiny but remarkably bright light, that routinely proves its worth in illuminating human flesh, and don't think to give the hinge it's on another 70 degrees of rotation so that it could also serve to light the face of the user when using the web cam. Because that's never a problem!?!?! Why why why!? This is so obviously an element that has had some design thought go into it- how on earth could it have ended up producing such a powerfully unfulfilling experience I HATE THE LITTLE LIGHT! It promised so much, it does so little, and what it does is rubbish. But because it's such a cute idea, I always use it and it always drives me up the bloody wall! Argh! Driving me mad!

Annoyance 2. The scratch resistant lid.
Mmm, shiny metal, mmm, brushed alloy, nice. I might hold off stickering you cos your so purdy. Oh damn, Siemens have already stickered you (philistines!).



Ah well , I'll keep you safe and purdy, slip into my bag and then... WHAT THE?!*&&?>


This is by no means a scratch resistant- it is rather a foil soft canvas, a field upon which to pirouette creatively, and leave ones mark. For you see these scratches were made by laying the powerbrick upon the surface- THE POWER BRICK- as if that would never go near the casing!?!

Annoyance 3. The power brick.
Which is just shit. Not bad, not wrong, not lethal. In it's defence it's small, unassuming subtle, but quite clearly nobody at HP has so much as looked at this non-entity since forever- and the result is undesign. The result is annoying tangles of wire, scratched lappy lids (see above, about which I AM STILL FUMING!), and a good three minutes of grief every time one unpacks to set up. Why HP? Why do you not realise what a tedious ball ache you are foisting on us? I unpack the laptop twice a day, maybe six days a week. For five minutes a day, half an hour a week, one whole solid day a year I faff with your utterly apathetic approach to power supplies. It's a thing I buy from you- BLOODY DESIGN IT YOU LAZY SODS! Oh, I'm sorry, was this feeble flap of Velcro your idea of a design for managing cables? Hmm? WRONG!

Annoyance 4. The nipple.
Why?? I mean really, the nipple is rubbish- always was. As soon as the track pad came along we all breathed a huge sigh of relief, uncramped our hands and got on with life. And this isn't even a good one. So why? It's just pathetic. Drop it.


Annoyance 5. The trackpad.
Oh, maybe this is why: You can't design track pads can you? You've properly stuffed this one up. Those buttons need a bar between them and the pad, especially if you dome their backs otherwise.... oh, yes this happens. Hard to explain in text, but basically whenever you touch a trackpad button, the pointer jumps 2 inches up or down, because your thumb brushes the pad, creating a second contact and stuffing up the pointer. So now it takes twice as long to move anything, and I routinely misfile emails and folders. You pillocks- it's not like this is the first laptop with a pad- did you not SEE that every other pad has a safety bar? DID YOU NOT TEST!?!



Annoyance 6. the '1' key.
Ok just a little one this, but it's smaller than all the other keys. Why? I know the number is smaller- I don't need to be reminded. Did you just run out of space? What? It doesn't actually matter- it doesn't affect the usage of the keyboard (which is, in all honesty, very mediocre- the Dell XPS m1330 I'm moving off has a far nicer keyboard) but it does look shit. I mean really really compromised and nasty and shit. And like you don't care.



Annoyance 7. The lid latch.
Is this really the best you can do- after decades of designing laptops- a round peg?? With an all around latch grove?? Which only latches on one side?? That sticks out of the lid ALL the time?? and doesn't even latch shut properly 1 time in 5?? It fits the pattern, I'll give you that- the half-baked awfulness of it. It's actually quite well made too- just a really really rubbish idea that doesn't work.

Annoyance 8. The volume control.
Ok, you're not the only ones to get this wrong- touch sensitive buttons for specific functions on a laptop are a pet hate of mine, and everybody does it. The only laptop I have with a decent volume control is the Alienware Aurora M9700 (an incredible beast- I can't actually carry it any distance without damaging myself though) which has a little dial- a physical rheostat or some such, actually controlling the volume of the output amp. It's brilliant. I can turn it down before I turn it on, and it works with any and all software and isn't slowed by software multithreading. HP, your solution sucks.



Your slider thing has an AWFUL mode of interaction- it took me ages to figure out I have to slide my finger along, and no two slides have the same effect. Volume control is trial and error- deafening error- every time. For the record- the Dell also has shitty touch sensitive volume buttons and the Alienware had some other functions with the same type of button, which I had to deactivate. People- touch sensitive is rubbish. And we all know you put them on because they are cheap. Stop being so obviously cheap. It's nasty. And that is HP's shtick.



In conclusion then, this is a good laptop wrapped in a shell of unfeasibly annoying design disasters, and drags down HP's reputation every time I look at it. I'll soldier on with it- I have to, and if truth be told it is good enough in many many ways, but it will gnaw at my soul every day. If I go postal, you'll all know why!

And the Future Coalesces

For quite a while now the future home of BBC R&D has been in the balance. Kingswood Warren has rung to the sound of jolly and not so jolly engineers for 60 years, but the decision was made to sell it off some years ago, and the ink dried on that deal in 2008- we have to leave by March 2010 at the latest.

Sad though it will be to leave behind the acres of fields, the woods, the deer and the delightful architecture, the greatest stress has been getting to grips with the real practicalities of getting a new base of opperations sorted out. Facilities of the type needed to support a 21st century research lab don't come cheap, or quick, so a future home needed sorting out and urgently.

All this is happining against the background of shifting a significant proportion of research to the north west of course. In that area there has been greater reason to be optimistic- Media City development is continuing apace (I was up there last month, and the buildings are hurtling up). Even before we occupy the brand new space on Salford Quays, the R&D dept has secured an excellent interim lab space on the current Oxford Road campus, current home of BBC Manchester. In fact it looks like there's going to be sufficient staff relocating to that new lab to form a good core- a 'critical mass'- for the future of the team there. Rowan De Pomerai is doing an excellent series of posts as he works on the spec for the interim and long term establishments up there (plus occasional diversions explaining how he comes to be slightly the worse for ware- it's not all work work work up there!), and of course Ian Forrester is blogging on that work from the BBC Backstage and his own personal points of view.

Now at last we have reason to be optimistic in the South too, as last week the deal was signed off to give us a new lab in London. Various options have been explored- green field sites near Kingswood, industrial units near Gatwick, and BBC locations across London and the south east were assessed. The final choice is Centre House, in the White City area(just behind the tube in fact- and from where you get this stunning view of Television centre (which interestingly, and slightly alarmingly, has just been awarded graded 2 listing status)).

Granted, Centre House is not the most delightful architectural gem of these fair isles. Nor it is nestled charmingly in the twee woods of some arboral vale. On the other hand it is smack bang in the middle of the corporation we are here to serve and from which we have for too long been a distant and slightly detatched peripheral, and it's all ours.

That last point is crucial- R&D does things differently to the rest of the BBC- we try and break stuff, we try stuff that hasn't been done before, that can't be done right now. In our current buildings we regularly completely repurpose huge rooms. We build temprary data centres, transmission suites and edit facilities- in the standard central support BBC this would lead to an impossible train wreck of corporate bureacracy, policy conflicts and the costs would be appaling. In our gaff, we do what we need to do to get the job done.

So, as of Thursday, Centre House is a hard hat zone- before the builders get to work though we're off on a quick recce- if I get good shots I'll flickr them!

Disgusted of Kemptown

I do sometimes indulge in a little bit of political letter writing- it's good for the spleen I believe. There was a post on the local tory blog that I picked up via twitter, and it pissed me right off, so I've written to the local tories. And this is what I said....

Dear Sir or Madam,

It has come to my attention that the Brighton Tory web site is currently publishing a story casting aspertions upon the probity of the Green MEP for the south east region, Ms Caroline Lucas. The article (http://www.brightonandhoveconservatives.com/news/61/) seeks to equate the high costs of administration that Ms Lucas's office runs is in some way analogous to the indiscriminate largess indulged in by MPs of all parties at Westminster, and seeks further to imply that her assertion of honesty and of being distinct from the rampant "troughing" of Westminster representatives is in some way "disingenuous".

It's my belief as an independent and non-aligned voter, that you are being rather "disingenuous" yourselves. Ms Lucas's expnses seem to me to be well justified in her role as a representative for a large swathe of England, and one of the few representatives the many thousands of British Green voters have in Europe. I understand that she is an active member of many committees, is right at the core of the European coalition of Green parties, and I can personally testify to her excellent communication with constituents like myself. In fact, in this last regard, she and her staff are streets ahead of your own parties incapability to so much as respond to directly submitted requests and comments by email to representatives. In short, she works very hard, and does a damn site better job that your sorry lot.

At a time when the Tories in Europe are sidling up to the worryingly reactionary fringe parties, instead of being at the heart of European centre right parties, I think it's high time you took a long hard look at your own policies, process and responsibilities to your constituents. As a party you are thoroughly tarred with the Westminster expenses scandal- you are in fact corrupt, and recognised as such. Simply spitting false allegations against your opponents does nothing for you or for the level of political debate.

I have take the opportunity to copy this letter in to the Tory representatives in the European Parliament- my hope is that you'll all take this opportunity to reconsider this approach to the politics of muck spreading.

Yours in some considerable disgust,

Ant Miller


This is going to:
carolinelucas@greenmeps.org.uk, daniel.hannan@europarl.europa.eu, office@nirjdeva.com, richardjames.ashworth@europarl.europa.eu

Update in the Pro stuff

A quick update on the last post- the process of setting up the blog and getting editorial sign off is underway, but not by any means completed. This also means of course that there remains plenty of opportunity for you gentle readers- yes, both of you- to let me know what sort of thing you'd like us to put on the blog.

So, point us at great other blogs, give us leading topics to explore, pose us perculiar and intriguing questions, or just ask us straight forward questions. I cannot promise that the new blog will be able to address everything, but your queries will help us set the right tone. And if I can't answer there, I might be able to here.

Taking Things Pro

This is almost one of those blog posts one shouldn't write- as in, one that you write because you haven't written one for ages. Kind of a 'contractual obligation' blog post. Except it isn't really, I have no obligation to post. Not yet. Will soon.

Yes, that’s right, I might soon be blogging professionally, and at that point this whole lovely friendly process of punting my thoughts out to be ignored by the world will become a proper millstone. Or a more disciplined and hence efficient process.

The blog we’re talking about is a proposed BBC R&D one, to sit alongside the excellent efforts of the BBC RAD blog, the Radio Labs, Journalism Labs and the Internet blog itself, not to mention the Backstage blog. All this public relaying of information can seem a little overwhelming, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of BBC and even more public, so a profusion of communication is to be expected, and perhaps encouraged.

NOTA BENE: Extensive internal BBC review and approval is required before this goes ahead, so it's far from a done deal.

Right now we are plotting out the first few months of posting and trying to ensure we get a good spread of coverage and aim at the right level for our interested parties. Some people will be generally interested in what we’re up to, but not particularly technically minded, others will be fellow engineers and broadcast specialists fascinated by our work’s most technical elements- pitching at the right level for all will be a challenge. And that’s before we get into the confidentiality/ patent protection/ intellectual property management tangles of what we can and can’t talk about.

The R&D blog will initially sit on its own page like other blogs, but before too long it will form a core element of a refreshed public web presence for the department. We’re finishing up the initial requirements at the moment, with help from the lovely people at Howell Wong Costello, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Rain Ashford for her tremendous efforts to get this up and running. Rain will soon be heading back to BBC Learning after a year on Backstage and in R&D and we’re sorry to be loosing her- Cheers mi dear! Rain also produced much of the R&D TV output, including the whole of the Maker Faire segment in the latest edition, for which we're very grateful.

AAaaaand finally, just because I think a blog post is better with a picture, here’s something I knocked up tonight to stick on our office door, because I was bored with the usual office layout diagrams. Created in Lego Digital Designer. Go play

Trying Prezi at Thinking Digital

Whilst Alex was polishing off what turned out to be an excellent presentation for the afternoon session at Thinking Digital, I struggled on with Prezi . This is a fascinating tool for creating flash based presentations, but I think I need a good deal more practice with it, and a lot more design nous, in order to do presentations that actually look good rather than just weird. It's also quite easy to accidentally get things in the wrong order, and it's ironically quite hard to get an over view of the whole presentation and be sure you've included all you want to (I left out my flickr CC attributions! Web Crime!). And of course like any new toy it's an utter time sink- eating up perhaps eight hours to rehash a presentation I mostly had already got prepared and written an up and have already given a dozen times or more. Still, I will probably persist for a little while longer, and may even splurge on the stand alone version.

The free version is fully functional but you have to be online to use it. In Newcastle free street wifi is currently very widely available (though I'm not sure that'll last forever) and every venue we hung out in was similarly endowed, but on the train up the onboard wifi did flake out from time to time. Side note on the wifi, I shouldn't be churlish, especially not on the free wifi in standard on national express, but its one of those things that quickly evolves from delighting by it's very existence into annoying by it's imperfection (and I suspect I am peculiarly quick in moving things across these categories myself).

Being able to work offline would be a bonus with my commuting needs, but I'm not sure the branding freedom you also pay to get is actually worth it. OK, I get annoyed with D.O.G.s as much as the next person, but actually, using something this new and different it's helpful right now to have a little flag in the corner of the screen so people can see what I'm using- half the questions after my presentation were along the lines 'how did you do that- what software was it?' and I'm sure it would have been more if I hadn't pointed out the Prezi logo on screen.

This brings me in a round about way to the question of whether it worked, as in, did people get the message? In essence, I think it did work ok. My audience seemed attentive if not exactly enraptured, and I got a laugh and a couple of chuckles from three of the five humour points in the talk. It was a 15 minute slot at the end of a long (and late running) session- I was sixth of six presentations, and I was about two hours into the program as it ran. That’s not to say it was a hard crowd at all- they were switched on, all paying, and very intelligent and engaged, and all the other presenters had been excellent, entertaining and often profoundly motivational. So in all this, my tale of a BBC Micro for the 21st Century, as told through a spinny flash animation with a few pictures and a short film clip, worked well.

Another quick sidebar- in the end I didn't embed the video. This is because I only wanted to play a short part of the overall file, and I didn't have the kit handy to edit it down. Putting the whole clip into Prezi, online, would have turned it into a huge file and radically slowed down the whole save and download process. I think, if you're going to embed video, you need proper edit (and transcode) handy, and it's going to be easier to use the stand alone version of the software.

On stage I found it a very different experience to 'drive' compared with the way I usually use PowerPoint. In spite of it being a graphical 'look', the labourious online upload, especially on a flakey web link, meant that I ended up with a predominantly 'texty' rather than picturey presentation. All those text elements, instead of sitting in big chunks per slide, had their own, individual triggers and screens, so the talk bounced along with a new movement (and me clicking it) every 30 seconds or so. And then, when I did 'pop out' into one of my 3 minute rants, that seems a bit less organic to the whole piece (at least to me). I guess I'm just very used to (and bored with) powerpoint- anything else is going to take time to learn, and until I crack it, it's going to be intrucive into the presentations, and the creative process.

Love it though!

Blinking Digital

To my great shame I only spent a half day at this year's Thinking Digital conference, Herb Kim's intellectual gymkhana on the banks of the Tyne. I am profoundly grateful to have been able to join his role call of luminaries for the one afternoon and for the dinner too though.

I actually turned up a little early for the event so spent the morning trying to polish off my presentation at the cafe at Baltic in the sparkling company of Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, co-founder and CEO of Tinker.it. Alex is a profoundly cool and intelligent person, and she's probably forgotten more about the people and places around the digital culture in the UK, US and Canada than I will ever know, and with Tinker.it I think she and her colleagues are making a real positive difference to the world today. I think, hope, this is being recognised- keep a look out for more about Tinker.it on the BBC's technology web site. Whilst Alex was polishing off what turned out to be an excellent presentation for the afternoon session, I struggled on with Prezi (a quick overview in another blog post).

Thence to the Live Theatre to register, and meet our fellow presenters for the afternoon session. The first session was streamed, with Social Media in the main theatre, Practical Wisdom back over at Baltic, and The DIY Gadget session upstairs in the Live Theatre, hosted by the BBC's own Ian Forrester, and with yours truly one of the six presenters.

My fellow presenters are an excellent bunch:

• Alex I've already mentioned- she gave a great overview of Arduino, and her company's role in it, and ran through a load of the coolest projects they're working on, plus giving an excellent socio-philosophical grounding to the importance of the technology.
• Adrian McEwen of MCQN ran through more of the hacker projects he's been working on, including a live demonstration of the bubbleduino, which was reacting live to tweets of the event by spattering our guest of honour with detergent (he took that very well).
• Richard, Stuart and Dave of Jam Jar Collective- aka the Friispray crew- then gave a brilliantly energetic three hander presentation of their project, giving a massive tip 'o the hat to Johnny Cheung Lee, the previously mentioned guest of honour- I think they were a little nervous that their hero was sat front and centre in the audience (slightly spattered with detergent). I've seen friispray a few months ago, and it's great to see not only how they're developing the technology, but also using it in really important and original contexts; club nights are fun, sure, but in education environments for kids with learning difficulties their tech can be a transformative and important step forward, making a very real difference.
• Andy Huntingdon then followed with a spectacular and pretty wonderfully noisy demonstration of his projects that use low power embedded computing to turn everyday objects into rhythm sequencers. His tappity boxes have a great sense of the dramatic built in- the three second lag makes every use an act of knife edge anticipation.
• Ken Banks then presented his revolutionary SMS hub software, FrontlineSMS- I mean revolutionary very specifically. Ken's software allows anyone with a phone and a pc to set up a powerfull SMS communications hub, and it's being used around the globe to dramatic, life changing, culturally and politically significant ends. It is the engine of revolution in many areas, and saves lives because it allows communication and peaceful activism to be more powerful than riot and violence. He's such a sweet guy too- genuinely moved by the way that people worldwide have run with the tools he's made and crafted a better future for themselves and others.
• Me- I did the usual schtick about a BBC Micro for the 21st century- reviewing the old micro, how and why it had come about, and then exploring what the modern, equivalent challenges are, and then exploring the whole culture of makery hackery, the culture my co-speakers had been propounding, to see how today, the best way to acheive analogous goals would probably be to aly ourselves closely with all these guys, to support them, help them and foster a wider cultural uptake of their ethos. (One day I'll do a post about that!)

After our presentations Ian interviewed Johnny and they explored the role of the 4 minute video clip, properly, but not 'over' produced, as a great tool for sharing ideas. I'm looking forward to the video from that chat, and Thursday's presentation, as I think there's stuff for us in R&D to learn there.

Anyway, all in all a great session- thanks so much to Herb, the theatre staff, and all the Thinking Digital crew. That night's dinner was mind blowing too- but that's for another post!