Archive: June, 2012

After speaking at Go Beyond Pixels in St. John’s, I had some time to explore Newfoundland a little bit. Geri was kind enough to drive me to a place I really wanted to visit: the cable station at Heart’s Content.

I’ve wanted to visit Heart’s Content (and Porthcurno in Cornwall) ever since reading The Victorian Internet, a magnificent book by Tom Standage that conveys the truly world-changing nature of the telegraph. Heart’s Content plays a pivotal role in the story: the landing site of the transatlantic cable, spooled out by the Brunel-designed Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world at the time.

Recently I was sent an advance reading copy of Tubes by Andrew Blum. It makes a great companion piece to Standage’s book as Blum explores the geography of the internet:

For all the talk of the placelessness of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.

There’s an interview with Andrew Blum on PopTech, a review of Tubes on Brain Pickings, and I’ve huffduffed a recent talk by Andrew Blum in Philadelphia.

Now there are more places I want to visit: the nexus points on TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map; the hubs of Hibernia Atlantic, whose about page reads like a viral marketing campaign for some soon-to-be-released near-future Hollywood cyberpunk thriller.

I’ve got the kind of travel bug described by Neal Stephenson in his classic 1996 Wired piece Mother Earth Mother Board:

In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired.

Maybe one day I’ll get to visit the places being designed by Sheehan Partners, currently only inhabited by render ghosts on their website (which feels like it’s part of the same subversive viral marketing campaign as the Hibernia Atlantic site).

Perhaps I can find a reason to stop off in Ashburn, Virginia or The Dalles, Oregon, once infamous as the site of a cult-induced piece of lo-tech bioterrorism, now the site of Google’s Project 02. Not that there’s much chance of being allowed in, given Google’s condescending attitude when it comes to what they do with our data: “we know what’s best, don’t you trouble your little head about it.”

It’s that same attitude that lurks behind that most poisonous of bullshit marketing terms…

The cloud.

What a crock of shit.

Whereas other bullshit marketing terms once had a defined meaning that has eroded over time due to repeated use and abuse—Ajax, Web 2.0, HTML5, UX—“the cloud” is a term that sets out to deceive from the outset, imbued with the same Lakoffian toxicity as “downsizing” or “friendly fire.” It is the internet equivalent of miasma theory.

My friend @substitute suggested replacing every technobabble instance of “cloud” with “the Moon” and it’s changed my life

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) January 6, 2012

Death to the cloud! Long live the New Flesh of servers, routers, wires and cables.

Last September was a pretty amazing time to be in Brighton: dConstruct followed by Maker Faire followed by Update followed by Flash On The Beach and Improving Reality.

This September looks like it’s going to be equally amazing. The Brighton Digital Festival is back—an umbrella label for all the arts and technology events under one banner. There’s already some great stuff lined up.

September is going to kick off with Reasons To Be Creative, the conference formerly known as Flash On The Beach. It’s got a great line-up of speakers. I’m looking forward to having Dan, Meagan, Mark, Jon, Colly, Yaili and Hannah in town. Tickets go on sale in a couple of weeks.

With a one-two punch, Reasons is going to be immediately followed by dConstruct. A few quick notes about this year’s event…

1. Tickets are still available. Not many, but they’re there. Grab one if you haven’t already.
2. There are also still places available for most of the workshops. Remy’s HTML5 workshop is sold out but you can still grab a spot on Ethan’s responsive design workshop, Lyza’s mobile web workshop and Jonathan’s CSS workshop at the early-bird rate. Remember: a workshop also gets you complementary access to the conference day.
3. If you work with a forward-thinking company and a bunch of you fancy coming to dConstruct, check out the sponsorship options. We’d love to have you on board.

And then, the day after dConstruct, it’ll be time for this year’s Maker Faire which promises to be bigger and even better than last year (and it was bloody brilliant last year).

I’ve also got a little something up my sleeve. I’m planning to put on an event the evening before dConstruct. It won’t be web-related but it will very much tie in to this year’s dConstruct theme, Playing With The Future.

Watch this space.

June is about to draw to close and I’ve spent the entire month within the borders of the UK. That’s quite a change from the previous month: I was at three different conferences in three different countries in May.

First off, there was Mobilism in Amsterdam. It was, unsurprisingly, very good indeed. Mind you, I was getting a little disheartened on the first day of the conference when there was talk after talk describing how to make web apps look and feel more like native apps. The question of why exactly this would be desirable never seemed to get asked. I was beginning to worry that we were going to enter a period of making the same mistakes we did a few years back when everyone was trying to slavishly imitate desktop interactions on the web. The result is a kind of uncanny valley of interaction where apps behave almost, but not quite, like their native counterparts.

My fears were allayed on the second day of Mobilism though, particularly when Scott blew everyone’s minds. There was a veritable feast of future friendly thinking from Lyza, Jason, Brad, and Stephen too.

Speaking of future friendliness, there was a second Mobilewood gathering recently and the Future Friendly site now sports a new section entitled Come Aboard.

By the way, thank you to everyone who provided questions for my panels at Mobilism. They went well, although in retrospect two panels were maybe a bit much. Still, it was fun trying to get a statement other than “no comment” out of the Google Chrome representative on the browser panel.

Later in May I was in Belgium for Multi-Mania, a grassroots event run by students. I enjoyed myself but there was definitely a problem with having multiple tracks—the usual feeling of missing out on something, especially when some of the rooms filled up really quickly. The main stage also suffered from being directly connected to the exhibition hall which meant there was a lot of sound leakage. A shame, really.

My last speaking gig in May, on the hand, was a very smoothly-run event. I was in St. John’s, Newfoundland for Go Beyond Pixels. The fact that the conference was really well put together is all the more surprising considering it was the first time that Levin had ever organised an event! I hope it won’t be the last. He put on a great show and gave all the speakers a very warm welcome.

Oh, and Newfoundland was beautiful.

Since getting back, I’ve been enduring the English Summer. As nice as Brighton has been for a month, I’m looking forward to getting to sunnier climes.

So that’s exactly what I’m going to do, starting with a trip to Barcelona in just over a week’s time for Webvisions. I’ll be doing a half-day workshop on responsive design and progressive enhancement.

If you’re thinking of coming, here’s a little tip: go to the registration page, scroll down to the bit where it says “enter promotional code”, click that link, type “KEITH”, and hit the “Apply” button …Boom! Now your conference and workshop pass has a 20% discount applied.

Alas, I won’t be able to stick around for the conference day itself. I need to get over to Austin for An Event Apart.

I’m very excited to get to Austin when it’s not South by Southwest, but I’m also extremely nervous about my talk. I’ve spent most of this month at home trying to finish up my presentation. I fear I may be trying to squeeze an awful lot of stuff into one talk. I might have to speak very fast to fit it all in …or I suppose I could be sensible and try to trim the presentation down.

Anyway, there are still some tickets available for AEA Austin if you want to see me sweat …and I’m not just talking about the Texas heat.

One hundred years ago today, Alan Turing was born.

I could claim that without him, we wouldn’t have computers; that without him, World War Two would have lasted another two years at least.

But the truth is that the history of innovation and invention is rarely as linear as that, and that if one genius hadn’t made the great leap forward, some other genius would have. The pieces were there, waiting in the adjacent possible.

And yet, in our timeline, history played out the way it did. So I can say that thanks to Alan Turing, we have computers; thanks to Alan Turing, World War Two was shortened by at least two years.

And I can, with absolute certainty, say that the way Alan Turing was treated after the war was absolutely shameful.

We can learn a lot from the life of Alan Turing. We can learn about computation, universal machines, and artificial intelligence. We can also learn about tolerance, compassion …and love.

Happy birthday, Alan. Love you.

— Andy Hume (@andyhume) June 23, 2012

Remy popped ‘round to the Clearleft office the other day with some more devices for the communal testing lab …although the Matrix-era Nokia is probably not all that useful.

The list of devices is starting to look pretty good. Of course there’s no such thing as “enough” devices, but this is at least beginning to look like a nice cross-section. I’ve been buying phone chargers and power strips in enough quantities that I’m starting to get bulk discounts.

If you’re in the neighbourhood, come on ‘round and try out your sites on these devices.