Lost Boy

Adventures in Home Gadgetry

In which a quest to purchase a breadmaker unlocks the secret of the latest digital advances in home technology...

In my lunch-hour I dutifully trot off into town to buy my wife a bread maker for her birthday. I wouldn't dream of buying her a kitchen appliance normally but in her own way, bless her, she's as much of a gadget lover as I am.

So I wander into Argos to pick up the one she's carefully chosen and, after dutifully jotting down the catalog number on the requisite slip, take it to the cashier so they can fetch it from the stock room for me.

However I'm then told that they can't guarantee that they'll give me the exact same brand or model of breadmaker. In fact the only thing they will guarantee is to take precisely the same amount for it. It'll be pot luck which one I get. Err...hello?

Reeling in confusion I return to work, intending to order one from the web. Surely this will be an easier option? You'd think.

Firstly the Argos website can't be viewed with Netscape 6 or other browsers with the same rendering engine. I chuckle to myself at their cluelessness and idly consider shopping elsewhere just to show them whose boss. I also ignore their suggestion to ring them up and order items from the catalogue. "You're not catching me out that way" I think.

One browser change later I find the breadmaker. However at this point I'm struck with doubt: said baking device looks the same, boasts jam making facilities, and is the exactly the expected price. BUT it doesn't advertise the overnight timer which is the absolutely essential feature required to fulfill Debbie's dream of tasty fresh bread. Cue Samuel L. Jackson impression -- "HmmMmmm that is a tasty loaf, mind if I take a swig of your orange juice to wash it down?".

But this is the all-powerful web. Maybe I can track down the CoolTouch Breadmaker on the Morphy Richards website, confirm the timer function, and return to order it from Argos just in time for it to arrive for her birthday.

At this point I'm greeted by a flash based website (cue sigh) and an exciting animation that teases that "You are about to see a new addition to the Morphy Richard range..." My heart starts beating rapidly, and my finger trembles against the mouse button. Could this be the next generation of kitchen gadgetry? What wonders to behold? Perhaps a breadmaker that creates bagels, muffins, or even croissants?! Oh no, it's something much better.

A digital iron.

A digital iron that allows me to control the temperature of my iron with the touch of a button.

The merest touch of a button!

A digital iron with a 400cc water tank with no drip system. Variable steam facility with (my italics) steam shot facility and digital status display with audible(!) temperature warning. All lovingly rendered in three dimensions. See? Click the button and you can watch this beauty spin round and round all afternoon.

But wait, there's more.

You can view the Digital Iron Presentation which will tantalise you with the additional details such as "less moving parts" (bye, bye, clockwork iron!); "easy to use and reach controls" (enhanced user experience!); "whole screen illumination" (iron in the dark!); "temperature settings default to max" (burn it all!); auto on/off function (surprise your friends!) and much more.

Racked with indecision I hesitate at this point. Do I pursue my purchase of the CoolTouch Breadmaker or do I surprise my darling wife with the latest in digital ironing technology?

But then I realise that I'm a New Man and do all my own ironing. In fact I wouldn't let her near my trousers for fear that creases would turn up in all sorts of obscure places. So the iron would be for me and not her. Which leads me to the further revelation that this 400cc steamy monster isn't up to spec. What I want is an iron that will allow me to iron my shirt at precisely 25.75 degrees, not some measly 3 heat settings. And I want downloadable tones and tunes for those audible warnings. And where's the developer kit, dammit! That's what I call digital technology. And I'm not upgrading from my analogue ironing misery until its available.

Are you listening Mr Morphy Richards? I think not!

Reading To Some Purpose

...and that purpose is "Keep Leigh Away From The Computer". Getting a bit fed up with programming and web surfing recently, so I decided it was time to pick up my reading habit once more.

Here's where my paper-surfing has been taking me. In case you're interested.

Have recently finished:

• Gibson's Pattern Recognition: excellent as always. I flirted with this for a day or two as I knew it'd totally draw me in. I was right. The themes reminded me a bit of an Iain Banks novel towards the end, particularly the story behind "The Footage". May post some musings about "Apophenia" at some point. See also: "Synesthesia"
• James Gleick's Faster really does surf through "the acceleration of just about everything" and makes for some thought-provoking reading along the way. The phrase "we are surrounded by ephemera" particularly resonated.

I've just picked up The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. I'm going to be interested to see what she makes of the theory. I first encountered the term in one of Richard Dawkins' books (I forget which). I'm hoping that Dawkins' enthusiastic foreword isn't indicative of Blackmore's approach: I tend to find Dawkins to be too reductionist and I don't think that viewpoint properly credits the power/utility/benefits of emergent properties in the phenotype. Mind you I've not kept up with his recent work so maybe his ideas have evolved along these lines.

Directly in the queue behind these are Small World, one of the plethora of popular science books on network theory that have cropped up recently, and Impossibility which just looked like an interesting read.

I also have Semiotics for Beginners (full-text available online, but I bought the book because I'm a Nice Man...and a luddite); The Pursuit of Oblivion; David Attenborough's biography, "Life on Air"; and The Number Devil, which have all been languishing on the shelf for a while, so I've dusted their covers and promised them I'll read them soon.

I'm also trying to decide whether I've got the energy to read A New Kind Of Science and/or The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. The latter is probably the more likely candidate as I've enjoyed Gould's other books and my interests have recently been returning to biology, ecology, neurology, etc. The stuff that absorbed me during my first degree (started 13 years ago now, eek!). Unfortunately there's not a great deal in computing (in general, not just books) thats exciting me at the moment. There's a lot of "more, faster" but not a lot of "different", if that makes any sense.

Book recommendations gratefully received. (See told you I was a luddite. Book recommendation engines? Pfah!)

Strange Banana

Further proof to myself that my design skills could easily be replaced by a small shell script: Strange Banana: computer-generated webpage design.

I've been idly clicking through this for a couple of minutes and seen layouts that were quite reasonable. Better than I could have produced anyway, but that's not saying much really. Maybe someone should hook it up to a MT, Manila, etc template generator.

Nice XHTML + CSS demo too. Look ma, no tables!

Ultrasound Scan Photos

Thought I'd share these photos with the world as I'm feeling pretty proud at the moment. We've just come back from the 20 week ultrasound scan of our new baby.

The good news is that everything seems perfectly normal!

In this photo you can see the babies face. Or rather I should say her face!

This is more of a profile shot, although the baby wasn't co-operating by being in a easily photographed position. In fact we had to get scanned twice, with a brief break for a walk around in the hope of jostling the baby into a new position, to allow the nurse could perform all the required measurements and checks.

This last one is of the babies foot:

I can't express how cool it is to see your baby in the womb like this. In the course of checks we got to sit and watch the babies heart beat for a while. You could see all four chambers pumping. Magical.

Refer a Friend to FOAF-a-Matic

Norm Walsh emailed me to note that the "refer a friend" link from the FOAF-a-Matic is broken. D'oh!

It's pretty simple, so thought I'd jot it down here.

Basically the javascript code will read three additional parameters in the URL:

• name -- your full name
• email -- your email
• seealso -- location of your FOAF file

Obviously the values of all of these need to be URL encoded. Here's an example:

http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html
?name=Leigh%20Dodds&email=ldodds@ingenta.com
&seealso=http://www.ldodds.com/webwho.xrdf

If you then give someone a link to the FOAF-a-Matic with those parameters, it'll fill you in as their first friend and their FOAF file will automatically have a link to yours. This is a quick way to get your friends into the FOAF network without them having to hand edit their FOAF too much.

btw, planning to revive Mark 2 shortly once the next version of the Jena API settles down.

Autodiscovery Bookmarklet Generator

The Autodiscovery Bookmarklet Generator will generate Javascript bookmarklet code for autodiscovering metadata linked from an HTML document using the LINK tag. Thought it might be useful for folks wanting to glue various services together.

This has had absolutely minimal testing (i.e. I've checked it against FOAF and RSS examples) so let me know if you have any problems.

Its part of a suite of micro-utils I'm developing: tiny, but useful bits of code.

Conferences On the Web

Edd Dumbill and Dave Beckett have set up a Chump bot to allow community coverage of WWW2003. This is an excellent idea, and will sure to be packed full of useful and interesting links.

However one thing I'd like to see conference organisers do more of is to make the presentations available over the web as streaming video, or even just audio. While a certain amount can be gleaned from reading slides published after the fact, there's nothing like seeing a presentation for yourself. And it doesn't seem like the technology is that hard or expensive to actually deploy.

I'd certainly pay money for a service like this as there are a vast number of conferences which I'd love to attend but can't (usually for cost of travel reasons).

The JBoss Documentation Project. Why Doesn't It Exist?

Has anyone considered starting a collaborative, open source JBoss documentation project?

The current JBoss documentation is out of date. Even the "for fee" documentation is lagging behind the current release which is a pretty poor state of affairs anyway, but for a company thats trying to make money out of an open source project it seems pretty foolhardy: surely you need to build as good a level of supporting services as possible? Raw documentation is basically entry level, no hand holding support after all.

Even when it is up to date, the documentation is still not that hot. It could do with a good editor, IMHO.

I'm sure there are a lot of JBoss gurus out there with knowledge to share, so why isn't this knowledge being gathered together? My impression is that this is actually discouraged, although hopefully I'm wrong. When I first looked at the JBoss project a year or so ago, there were some community docs, but it seemed as if these were being "deprecated" in favour of the for-fee docs. This struck me as odd at the time as basically it amounted to asking users not to write things up and give them away for free. This is counter to my impression of how a good open source project ought to be run, and seems to stifle community building.

Good quality, free documentation would obviously threaten a for-fee product if the latter wasn't as good. Although I'm pretty sure that throwing a good technical author and/or editor at a set of collaboratively produced documentation ought to yield something even better. The model I'm thinking of is something similar to whats being done with Cocoon: the Wiki is the fermenting ground for the "formal" documentation. Although in that instance, the more structured documentation is free too.

So I'm curious why there isn't already a community documentation effort, even if it was an unofficial effort separate from JBoss.org? There are great swathes of documentation missing: e.g. architectural design notes, roadmaps, etc. Or if it does exist I've not come across it.

Seems like such a beast could be a safety buffer for those of us moving to using JBoss in production, but with uneasy faith in the projects ability to communicate design goals and documentation effectively.