Category: technology

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and I pledged to write a blog post on women in technology. So here we are..

It's easy for me to offer examples of women in technology as, for some reason I don't understand, there are plenty of women involved in (mostly opposing) electronic voting. Here are some of the leading lights in no particular order, I apologise in advance for any omissions:

• Rebecca Mercuri: One of the first people to study electronic voting in computer science terms. Her PhD was on e-voting and she's been a vocal opponent ever since.
• Barbara Simons: President of the ACM for two years, a former IBM researcher she is an influential critic of electronic voting and was a co-author of the SERVE report which stopped the US government pursuing Internet voting.
• Margaret McGaley: One of the key activists against e-voting in Ireland and recently completed a Computer Science PhD on electronic voting.
• Bev Harris: A leading force behind the BlackBoxVoting activist group in the US, a key player in the Diebold security scandals and lead character in the documentary “Hacking Democracy”.
• Becky Hogge: Becky was until this January the Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and so played a critical role in the past two years of their campaigning against electronic voting.
• Louise Ferguson: Louise is a leading usability expert who has played a major role in opposition to e-voting in the UK. She has also contributed to work on both sides of the Atlantic in improving the usability of the voting process. She also chaired the Open Rights Group through much of its e-voting campaign.
• Lorrie Faith Cranor: Lorrie was an early researcher of e-voting who over time has become more critical of the technologies. Her early work on 'Sensus', an e-voting system, was pioneering at the time and probably informed her subsequent caution.

Of course none of these one liners do justice to these women, but by flagging them up here I hope to emphasise the huge role women can and do play in technology.

Ada Lovelace was an extraordinary woman and widely considered the first programmer, more on her life at Wikipedia

Back in March this year our home was burgled. They took lots of stuff including my iMac and week old MacBook Air. Thankfully they left behind an old iBook and all my external backup disks even though they had all been in the same room as the computers they took.

Still, getting back up to speed in my work and homelife was a slow process. Thanks to an ad-hoc strategy (when I remembered basically), my backups were a week old so I did lose some work however relying on server-based IMAP mail meant email was ok.

Whilst waiting for the replacements to come (and I have to say the insurers were great in getting everything) I put some thought into a better backup strategy. I already had two 1TB LaCie external Firewire hard disks that were mirrored using software RAID. My first step was to schedule SuperDuper to backup a full system image to the LaCies every other night.

I got a third, smaller, LaCie drive also on FW800 so that I could use Time Machine as a more fine-grained incremental backup, but of my home folder only. This wouldn't let me do a full restore but could recover from file corruption and deletions in error.

Finally, to cover the scenario of fire, flooding or another burglary I set up JungleDisk as a remote backup system of my home folder (less music and movies). This uses Amazon S3 as a low cost reliable online storage system 'in the cloud'. The Mac client was a bit flakey originally but now is superb and I can highly recommend it though I have turned off encryption to prevent lock-in improve speed. The initial backup took an extremely long time, days, but now nightly backups only upload changes. This plus a move to 20MB broadband has made JungleDisk completely practical.

Back to those LaCie drives… Unfortunately, while the 800MB connection was fast, the many drives and RAID software meant initial access after they had gone to sleep or on a reboot was painfully slow… minutes in fact. I also found the software RAID to not be particularly reliable if one of the disks experienced problems. This may have been compounded by each LaCie 1TB disk actually having two hard drives inside it. Throw in the cables and three power adaptors involved and I wasn't happy about the setup or its power consumption.

Enter the Drobo, a clever drive system which uses RAID-like features to store your data across up to 4 drives which are removable and upgradeable. Even better this was all handled on the Drobo, no software was needed on the computers accessing it. I had been watching this for a while, aware of my growing storage requirements however on launch it had been USB 2 only and I knew only Firewire 800 would meet my needs.

Lo and behold they released an updated version with FW800 and I was tempted. When one of my LaCie drives started to have trouble I quickly resolved to buy the Drobo. To be fair to LaCie I've used many external drives and I personally have found LaCie drives to be excellent, quiet and fast. They also come with all the cables you need which I find to be a very decent touch, especially when there are three or four types they include for all the possible connectors. Yet drives do die and comparing the cost of a new LaCie, or the wait on warranty, versus getting a new 1TB drive for the Drobo only further makes the case for Drobo. I bought the very quiet and low energy Western Digital Caviar Green Power 1TB drives. The price on Amazon seems to keep dropping giving an excellent cost per GB.

The Drobo and Green Power drives were extremely easy to set up. The Drobo was nicely presented in a Mac-like fashion. The only minor quibble was that the provided software didn't alert me to new versions being available despite saying it had checked. A manual download from Drobo resolved this and now I'm delighted with how fast, quiet and painless using the Drobo has been. With two 1TB disks formatted as a single Drobo partition I have SuperDuper backing up to a sparse image every other night. I also have Time Machine continually backing up to a sparse disk image thanks to Erik Barzeski's investigations' which I came to via the always excellent Jon Gruber.

One thing worth noting that I didn't see mentioned on Erik's post is that you can't restore from your Drobo Time Machine backup via the swishy star warp interface (for want of a better name!). You need to manually mount the disk image and use the Finder to copy over the files you need. Not as cute but I've tested it and it works fine.

So now I have one local gadget, the Drobo, and JungleDisk in the cloud for all my backup needs. Less cables, less power adaptors and less hassle. I certainly don't want to see any more burlars but I'm glad I rethought my backups. Please have a look at what you're doing to protect your data too.

UPDATE 23/1/09: Paul Owen points me to a comment on Erk's Drobo post which shows that the 'warp interface' can still be used in fact:

When you want to restore a file from a sparse bundle, mount the sparse bundle manually. Then option-click the TM icon in the menu bar. You'll notice that the “Enter Time Machine” entry has changed to “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”. Use this option, navigate to your sparse bundle and — lo and behold — all your backups are there.

I have also decided to keep using a single LaCie disk as another offsite backup, I update it with SuperDuper every month or so and store it at my parents' house. It's painfree and just adds another level of comfort in case my Drobo is stolen/destroyed and restore from JungleDisk is problematic.

Makes me wish I wasn’t already an ORG member, just so I can write Larry’s the Daddy. If you aren’t then join ORG for digital rights, civil liberties and solidarity with some truly wonderful people…

The next five people who sign up to support our work and include “Larry’s the Daddy” in the ‘how did you hear about’ field will receive, along with our growing list of support benefits, a signed copy of Remix.

Full ORG blog post

I sort of promised to myself that I wouldn't write this post. It's a bit nauseating to read about how someone else has a new gadget… and it doesn't really add anything to the body of knowledge.

But… I relented from self-censorship because the MacBook Air I've had for the last week is not just a little different or a little better. Owning a MacBook Air has radically changed the way I use and think about my computer.

My previous MacBook was a decent solid computer, incredible for everything it could do and how well it did these things. Powerful processor and so on. Yet I never used or hardly used the majority of that functionality such as disc burning or audio in. For some people those things are essentials but for a 'knowledge worker' like me as long as I can connect to the Internet then I'm ok.

The MacBook (a recent one at that) was great but just too chunky and heavy to not notice it in my bag. The result was feeling like I was lugging a brick around – absurd when I recall how heavy my laptop was ten years ago – but still once I added a few reports in the bag it did add up. So often I just wouldn't pack my MacBook so I could feel more mobile… hmmm.

The MacBook Air is just so thin and light it's crazy not to take it everywhere. I'm using it to get through email and documents in all sorts of moments where previously I would be twiddling my thumbs or reading something useless I had picked up.

The Air's not for everyone, but as 37Signal's David Heinemeier Hansson has written, it could be the only machine for many people. I still enjoy using my 24″ iMac and just need a little effort to keep it synced with the MacBook Air. The other night I popped a rental DVD into the iMac and watched it on the MacBook Air in bed upstairs using VLC (Apple's DVD player won't play discs remotely for some pathetic fig-leaf copy protection reasons). Being so light the Air is the perfect player to snuggle with for a movie and doesn't risk setting the duvet on fire.

Given Apple have come this far with the form factor can a tablet be far off? It must be in the works but I like my keyboard and for many the MacBook Air is the game-changer.

It's almost exactly two years since I started working with Netmums.

For those who don't know them, Netmums are a group of mums who set about helping each other through the power of the Internet. With very little technical knowledge themselves they've managed to built Netmums up into a huge website with over 300,000 members and roughly 1.5 million pageviews each week.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of manic work on ORG's e-voting report, I was also developing the final stages of Netmums' new site. The new site is a complete revamp including fresh design (by an outside agency) and shifting all of Netmums membership data and content from custom PHP scripts and phpBB to Swing Digital's Content Management System and vBulletin.

The CMS still needed significant chunks of custom code to support the Netmums model of localised boards and listings. And we had to do several trial imports of the massive 'Coffeehouse' bulletin board system, which took hours to process.

When it came to launching Netmums members were very vocal on what they did and didn't like. So we've been tweaking things here and there whilst working on the new features that this change has enabled.

It's been incredibly exciting and very rewarding to see the biggest install yet for Swing Digital's software particularly given the good work Netmums do.

Yummy, the Yahoo! Toolbar now has added Spyware goodness. At least they're honest about it!

I have a backlog of posts and my lustrous new iMac is to blame. In a very good way.

For the past 3 years I have been using a 15″ PowerBook G4 whose 1Ghz processor had been feeling wheezy for the last year. But worse still, the hard disk was always full and I had filled every FireWire disk I could find too… If one thing OS X doesn't do well with, it's a full hard disk. Slooooow.

So I was very keen to get a MacBook Pro when they emerged from Cupertino, for the love of God they are up to five times faster! But wait, no FireWire 800 port? Just an Expresswhat slot? Not for me, at all. When the 17-incher slipped out with a FireWire 800 port I began to be tempted but I would wait for a second revision to iron out bugs before I fell for it. And I waited…

In the meantime my desktop consisted of:

• PowerBook on Griffin iCurve stand balanced on top LaCie DVD burner and a Mac Mini. Plus an iSight camera perched on top of the PowerBook screen.
• Apple 20″ Cinema Display on top a LacCie hard disk and a paperback book to ensure the screen lined up with the PowerBook's.
• PowerBook charger, USB keyboard, USB mouse, FireWire cables sprouting from everywhere and a USB tangle to printer, dictaphone and scanner.

It was a nice setup but a bit, cluttered and cable infested. I was sitting there one day waiting for a call wondering when the MacBook Pros would be updated when I realised that I was never disconnecting the PowerBook from its umbilical cords. The laptop was never moving, I was happily using my BlackBerry to take notes in meetings. Hmmmm… did I need another laptop after all?

Steve Jobs must have been aware of this dilemma from a hardened laptop owner (2 PowerBooks, 1 tangerine iBook and some PC laptops best not mentioned). He knew what I wanted because he unleashed the beast I'm now typing on… the 24″ iMac.

FireWire 800 port – check, big fat 500GB hard disk – check, Core 2 Duo – check, dual layer DVD burning – check. American Express – warming up.

There were only 2 things I did actually use the PowerBook for off the desktop – presentations and emptying my camera of images when on holiday. The new 80GB iPod solved this by being able to display and store photos and movies. The iPod Camera Connector is just a USB dongle but it works and needs no extra batteries or removing of memory cards like the old Belkin iPod readers did – works a charm. (Note: The iPod's photos will only be recognised by iPhoto if you let the iPod be mounted as a disk – remember to click the new 'Apply' button in iTunes if you want this change to stick)

Anyway, one thing led to another, and needless to say Apple Developer Connection discount later I was checking my order status rather too often. Having souped the big fella up with extra everything I did wait a month to get it, in which time I swear my PowerBook actually did get still slower.

When UPS delivered I couldn't quite believe the size of the box. There's no two ways about this – it is HUGE. I didn't actually realise how big it would be – how much bigger than the 20 incher could it be? You can see the difference my friends. It's a bright, crisp monster of a display. A few days after I'd been using it I suddenly realised that it was bigger than the 'big' TV we have in the living room. Insane.

Truly it's a wonderful machine which has worked like a dream for me from the first instant. The out-of-the-box experience is, as everyone says, quite superb and welcoming. The 24W inbuilt speakers are punchy, much better than previous iMac speakers that I've heard.

I've been following Khoi Vinh's good then less good experiences with his 24-incher which arrived a bit before mine. I have to say it's all been good for me, really wonderful.

Performance has been impeccably fast. Transferring over from my PowerBook has been unbelievably hiccup-free, I'm astonished really. The only complete flop was that PGP 8 stopped working, breaking the built in support MailSmith has for PGP. I had a very bad feeling from reviews of PGP 9.5 which MailSmith doesn't support anyway so I switched to MacGPG very easily (though the preference pane doesn't work for me).

Everything else just worked, but still I spent a good couple of hours updating everything to make sure I had as many Universal versions as possible. Fireworks MX 2004 which has always been a performance dog turned out to be very snappy even under Rosetta. Khoi complained of Rosetta's performance but I've been absolutely astonished at how good it's been, I really have forgotten about it – it's an extraordinary technical triumph.

I chose to transfer files manually over FireWire 800 (wonderfully fast) and forgot a few at first but I'm happier doing this than letting Apple's tool do it, I had some UNIXy things that would have been left behind.

I only have one remaining fly in the ointment. I've setup a RAID array of two 1 Terabyte LaCie drives but scheduled backups crash the wonderful SuperDuper The nice SuperDuper people reckon it's an Apple bug so I'm on manual backups until an update emerges.

My desktop now has only the iMac, wireless keyboard and wireless mighty mouse. That's it. Truly wonderful and it has proven extremely productive. I was transferred in less than a day and have been doing lots and lots of work since. Money well spent then!

When, at the University of Warwick, I began my academic life back in 1997, I was astonished at how bad reference management software was.

Pretty much everyone recommended using EndNote. But I soon learnt that this wasn't because they liked it. It was because everyone else used it so if you wanted help or to share reference files, EndNote was your best option.

But, in this writer's humble opinion, EndNote's interface is an unequivocal disaster. The software is also slow and just feels heavy on your computer. It's expensive but at least they do Windows and Mac versions.

I was pretty distraught each time I had to do some serious referencing until, somehow, I came across BookEnds four years ago. BookEnds works how I expect referencing software to work. It's easy to use, flexible and powerful… it's fast and affordable. The developer is friendly and responsive and new versions are regularly released. In other words, joy of joys, I can enjoy referencing again.

I'm straining every cell of my will-power to finish my doctorate this year. So anything that helps with my daily writer's block is extremely welcome indeed.

While nothing will prevent the incredible procrastination skills that develop as the thesis crisis deepens, even the smallest aid is helpful.

The recently released WriteRoom is not just an aid, it's a productivity hand-grenade. An interface-free typing space, it's a full-screen textual experience which gives you no choice but to get on with the work of typing.

Sure you could approximate the experience in Word with a lot of preferences faffing and closing palettes. But somehow knowing that you just can't bold, bullet and border something lightens the load.

Best yet, WriteRoom is free so enjoy.

(DarkRoom is a free Windows clone of WriteRoom for those that way inclined)

In the last twelve months I've nearly bought a new TV, two different digital video recorders, a Freeview box and a cable TV setup. I say nearly because in the final analysis I always worried that the kit would become obsolete rather too quickly.

We're in an industry crossfire of change – new standards and new ideas are bursting from every angle…

• The upgrade to High Definition (HD) format TV.
• The shift to widescreen TVs (which ratio?).
• The switch in the UK from analogue to digital TV.
• The Blu-ray vs HD DVD format battle.
• The start of the Internet becoming a serious delivery medium for video entertainment (e.g. iTunes)
• The very gradual emergence of viable media PCs suitable for living room usage (instead of dedicated boxes like TiVo).

All this to say… I'm going to keep waiting until the dust settles. There's tons of innovation going on but also plenty of opportunity to get stuck in one of many technological dead ends.