Category: notes from JK

We're in the waiting room called “Life Will Never Be The Same Again” as everyone tells me when they hear that our first child is due any day now… You know what? I understand that I can't possibly understand how different things will be. I'm comfortable with that and don't need to be told that it “Will… Never… Be…. The… Same… Again…” Thanks.

In the meantime we've been doing something which is apparently rather common among the expectant. We've been tidying. More specifically I've been getting a disproportionate amount of pleasure from finishing off, chucking out and giving away all those little things – pots of dried herbs, ancient after-shaves, prehistoric bottles of bleach – you name it.

I knew I was in trouble when I got excited about cleaning a cupboard and wiping the shelves. Shampoo samples have been used, shower gels finished and old razors chucked. Having less stuff is brilliant, it's easier to find things and you have more space. It's so liberating – really you need to try it.

I've just posted two new columns written for LinuxUser up on this site.

LinuxUser can now be purchased online in PDF format so if you're interested do visit their site

I'm packing in the final push of work before jetting off to Poland for the holidays. Time for a quick look-ahead to 2006, no retrospectives as I'm not sure I could look back at 2005 without writing a book!

What's coming up?

I think the simplicity meme is just going to just run and run. There's so much room for improvement in our world where even understanding how to open some doors can be made a challenge by poor design.

At Swing Digital we're really championing the elimination of complexity from school systems. Our software is helping to manage parent, pupil and alumni relationships without creating an additional burden on already overworked school IT managers. Web software rocks – when done right – but the richness of desktop applications has a huge amount to offer and we shouldn't forget that in the Web 2.0 rush.

The right tools for the job is how we need to keep looking at software. The savings in time and money by going for the most basic, standardised tools possible often far outweigh the disadvantages of having a few more 'advanced' features.

Key thing to remember in 2006

Doing things manually is often much cheaper than you might think. Automating a process can cost many orders of magnitude more than you ever imagined.

What geekery I'd like to see in 2006

• Blackberry 8700 available in the UK (and RIM not hobbled by dumb patent lawsuits)
• A new PowerBook with a serious speed-bump (and please don't lose the FireWire ports)
• Cross-platform reliable Video VOIP on the Mac from Skype, iChat or whoever – just make it work
• 8Mb/s broadband in my area

What to watch out for

• More nefariousness from vested interests, bad laws, crappy patents and awful DRM.
• Some nice new links between local and national services on Directgov and its like.
• A bushel more WiFi standards to get used to.
• One Google service comes out of beta – maybe.
• Lots more blogging here…

Have a great Christmas and New Year everyone.

What a week. Wednesday saw me at the excellent e-democracy 05 where all the great and good of the e-democracy mingled. Thursday was the launch of Brighton & Hove's own search engine p2b.net at lunch time then the Brighton web awards in the evening. Today I'm helping out at the d.Construct conference where there's loads of web 2.0 goodness being discussed. More on all these events when I catch a moment.

Positive feedback is rolling in for my January workshop, Managing Web Projects, everyone I talk to about it either wants to come themselves or knows a bunch of people who would love to come. I'm looking forward to some quality discussion and ideas-sharing on professionally delivering web projects.

In the meantime some more goodies to tempt fence-sitters into registering. I've confirmed that there will be free wifi across the whole venue for the entire day.

Also the lovely people at New Media Age are giving our workshop delegates a 31% discount on a 1-year subscription.

To sign up, see more information or just ogle the deals our partners are offering delegates, visit http://www.kitcat-workshops.com

I’ve been writing a column for the excellent LinuxUser Magazine for much of this year, I’ve been a contributor since 2003. For reasons I don’t quite understand they’ve had an on-off policy on archiving their content online. Personally I think if magazines like Wired and FastCompany can do it for free, there’s no reason why all magazines shouldn’t. Anyway with some arm twisting I’m happy to say all my columns will be archived online on my site here.

Here are some of my favourite bits from previous columns…

On Linux in Poland

In a country with high unemployment and low wages relative to the rest of the EU I was expecting FLOSS to play a major part in Polish digital life. I was very wrong… more

On Transport Direct

40 million quid well spent then. Once again we’ve seen the Government spend piles of good cash on not just average or bad but terrible ‘solutions’. Transport Direct is a slow, unusable, non-standards compliant site with unreliable data if you can figure out how to get to it. When such wonderful easy to use systems as Google Maps, WriteToThem.com and BaseCamp exist how can we keep pumping out such plain awful government sites? It’s time for it to stop… more

On FLOSS license incompatibilities

I get that sense that the multitude of different FLOSS licenses are blocking up the positive use of different open projects in other open works. The good intentions that go into building any freely available lump of software are based partly on the idea that others will benefit. If license incompatibilities prevent that then we are losing the key benefit of going for FLOSS in the first place… more

On Technology’s impacts

We’re all alone, floating isolated in bubbles of our technology. We’ve built ourselves cocoons of entertainment which make it easier for us to avoid meaningful relationships with other people and the world at large… more

I'm rather surprised and extremely honoured to have been chosen as a finalist in the “Best Personal Site and Web Blog category” for the Brighton & Hove Web Awards 2005. Neat!

In the spirit of these things: Please do vote for me!

The finalists are: * Sketchy Animation * Yummy Wakame * j-dom * Assistant Blog * Zender Bender

Good luck to them and all the other participants in the awards, which you can see here

Little Venice, here we come!

My workshop “Managing Web Projects” will be in the wonderful Amadeus Centre, we're going to have the whole place to ourselves and free wifi too. I'm already looking forward to the yummy lunch, their kitchen smelt incredible when I visited. The learning will take place in upper hall with breaks in the lower hall and dining room which are downstairs.

We had to bump the date by one day to fit in, so the workshop will be Thursday 26th January now. Looking forward to seeing you there!

http://www.kitcat-workshops.com

I'm really proud and happy to be able to announce my first ever workshop “Managing Web Projects.” I see this as my contribution in helping to formalise the web industry and to improve the general quality of work we as an industry are doing with our clients.

For a while now I've noticed two interesting, related trends. Firstly, and my clients won't mind me saying this, the vast majority of people responsible for managing web projects at the client end have no experience at all of technology projects or of marketing projects. They may have knowledge of one or the other but not both and developing effective web sites combines both and then some. Often they are given the responsible by their boss and they soldier on as best they can – yet in the meantime there's a whole school of thought emerging on how to best do this web thing. The web industry has been cherry-picking from the worlds of pure software development, ad agencies and coming up with new ideas too. All this evolution isn't really feeding back to clients.

This workshop is for them.

At the same time there are people working really hard in web agencies of all sizes and shapes. Many of these good folks have technical or design backgrounds and have never really had a chance to do some specific formal learning on the management side of delivering web projects. Maybe they want to move up to a job with more responsibility or maybe their agency just needs to formalise a bit, get some good processes in place. There isn't a web-specific forum to learn this stuff – it's either generic project management courses or technology focussed learning programmes. People in web agencies need to learn about more than technology and design.

This workshop is for them.

It's an idea that has been brewing for a long time and has had loads of positive feedback so I'm really really jazzed to be able to say that the plans have been laid and I can announce the first date, guest speakers and more.

I'm really honoured that Antonio Gould a director at 3form will be doing a guest slot on managing the client – web agency relationship. I'm also honoured and delighted that my new friend Andy Budd a director at clear:left will be doing a slot on web standards. Both are at the top of our field and know shed-loads.

I've also been showered with generosity from the lovely people at Omni Group and BrainStorm Software both of whom have offered me a 10% discount on their software for the workshop's attendees. My own company Swing Digital is also offering 10% off their software. As that Iceland ad went “Have we got a deal or have we got a deal!”

The workshop will be a day long learning adventure on 26th January 2006 with cocktails afterwards where everyone, not just attendees, is welcome to talk web. The venue is being finalised next week so I'll let you know as soon as I know!

The workshop site is at:
http://www.kitcat-workshops.com

I've added feeds for each category in the blog – you can also navigate those categories in the left-hand menu now.

I've also done some category tidying – when you see them actually 'out there' on your menu you realise you maybe had rather too many. I'm still tempted to whittle it down some more but with things like postal voting and e-voting it's tough to decide to merge them or not. Yes they're related but they ain't the same thing buddy boy.

I've also ironed out some general date weirdness in all my feeds. Rolling your own software can have it's quirky moments sometimes – feed date formats is definitely one of those times!

I also altered things so that all feeds from this site are full-text.

Let me know if any weirdness ensues.