Ged Carroll

Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

  • Internet experience in China

    If you are like me you probably have some favourite platforms that you find useful for your online life. This is a list of what I found worked and didn’t work from my internet experience in China. I thought that it would be handy to know, so that if you were visiting you could put surrogate services in place to continue your online life.

    Works well

    • Flickr – both Uploadr and the site work just as well as they work at home
    • Delicious – again just works as well as you would expect it to at home
    • Google – seemed to work fine, though this may change because they haven’t been the best corporate citizen in China recently. Interestingly, typing Google.com took me directly through to the US site rather than their usual trick of geo-targeting and loading up their local country portal instead – which is a source of mild irritation when I am travelling
    • Google Analytics – dashboard worked as promised
    • Feedburner – worked as good as usual. The 120-odd drop in subscribers on the day I arrived in China I put down to my content being uninteresting as it picked right up again the following day
    • Pretty much all the major IM platforms worked well: I use Skype, Yahoo! messaging, AOL Instant Messenger, GTalk
    • LinkedIn – worked fine
    • Last.fm – worked just as well as it does back home. I scrobbled and listened to music from Shenzhen
    • Web radio – I logged on to RTE to keep up with the latest news and current affairs closer to home with no problem at all

    Patchy performance

    • Foursquare – whilst I could select Hong Kong as a city, it found it often difficult to register with a place as it struggled to match location with ‘geo-coding’. A bit disappointing to be honest with you. I did use it successfully in Shenzhen where I found free wi-fi. Your mileage may vary

    Didn’t work

    • Twitter – I found myself using instant messenger much more, to compensate for the way that I use Twitter as a communications tool. I use a multi-platform instant messaging client called Adium and had no problem with Yahoo! Instant Messenger, GTalk, Skype, .mac | MobileMe messaging, AOL Instant messenger out here so workarounds for communication are really easy
    • Friendfeed – to be honest I only looked at this because I thought I may be able to catch up on a few Twitter feeds
    • Facebook doesn’t work, but my account is a zombie account anyway with content being fed in from other places like Twitter
    • Bloglines – I would recommend downloading an RSS newsreader client and importing your OPML file to temporarily replace using Bloglines. I missed my RSS reader far more than the more banal communications of Twitter

    Internet experience in China: performance

    Generally sites can be a little slow and occasionally you need to use the refresh button. Traffic gets very slow indeed on Sunday evenings.

    The Chinese are enthusiastic adopters of the ‘net and families often log-on to watch a film or TV programming on a Sunday evening – during this time, website load times noticeably increased and I found video Skype calls worse than useless. So let’s hope that BBC iPlayer doesn’t get too popular in the UK, otherwise reality TV shows may cause the ‘net to grind to a halt. More China related content here.

  • Shrook RSS reader

    How China’s internet regulations got me thinking about the Shrook RSS reader and service. I got unfettered internet access during a trip across the border from Shenzhen , China to Hong Kong. I briefly checked my Bloglines account and found that I had over 11,000 unread posts to catch up on.

    11029 unread items

    This got me thinking about a solution, so I will be trying out Shrook RSS reader and service to see if it provides an effective solution to my RSS addiction in China.

    Bloglines like Google Reader was blocked in China. I presume because these platforms would otherwise provide access to content that the Chinese government might to have censored.

    Shrook is a mix of application and cloud service with a freemium price plan offering always-on RSS goodness. Given my China-specific needs, it makes sense to go to smaller, niche services like Shrook. Shrook has a nice simple design to the RSS reader and is a native app for the Mac. It compares favourably to the way NetNewsWire was back in the day. The ability to sync online also allows RSS usage across different devices – so for instance home and work machines.

    UPDATE (September 19, 2020): Both Bloglines and the Shrook RSS sync service no longer exist. The last version of the Shrook RSS reader to work was published in 2016. The app has since been withdrawn from the Mac App Store. Bloglines closed down on October 1, 2010.

  • Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and The Great Secret of China by Simon Winchester

    Bomb, Book and Compass

    Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book and Compass delves into the history of science and innovation. The old adage of the victor writing history applies not only to wars but also the history of innovation and science. Everything you were taught in school about the history of science is likely to be wrong. It usually having a European focus; from the Greeks and Romans to the Italian-based renaissance via the wisdom preserved within the monasteries of Europe during the dark and early medieval ages.

    Book, the book and the compass

    The Chinese, in comparison, were seen as inscrutable and cunning rather like the Fu Manchu character of Sax Rohmer’s novels but less sophisticated than their European counterparts. This diacotomy helped assuage the consciences of empire-builders who had designs on the riches of the Chinese market, from bringing away silk and porcelain to finding a ready market for Indian-grown opium and laying the foundations for the modern-day heroin trade.

    Up until the European’s arrived China was the world’s largest manufacturer, counting for about 30 per cent of the economic activity by value in the world. This time of weakness is what the Chinese refer to as the century of shame, which was finally laid to rest when they claimed back Macau in 1999.

    Joseph Needham

    Bomb, Book & Compass is the story of Cambridge biochemistry professor Joseph Needham and his quest to find the real truth behind the history of science and China’s role within it, he did this during the chaos of the second world war, when he had the chance to get at the documentary evidence.

    He then spent the rest of his life curating and writing material for a vast series of books Science and Civilisation in China. These books were not only a historical record that put China closer to the centre stage position that they deserved in science, but also put the country on a more even standing with the ‘civilised world’ restoring or enhancing its reputation. In some respects Needham’s work could be considered to be the largest unpaid (in that China didn’t pay for it) corporate reputation campaign in the annals of public relations.

    Bomb, Book & Compass is a compelling read, by turns adventure, travelogue and political intrigue. I would recommend it, if nothing else for the very human portrait it paints of Joseph Needham as a man of great intellect and passion, but also a man with some very human failings. More book reviews here.

  • The Playful World by Mark Pesce

    The Playful World was written by Mark Pesce. Pesce was an early pioneer of the web. He was instrumental in bringing a 3d interface to the web through a standard called VRML. This was an early attempt to provide the kind of immersive ‘matrix’ experience envisaged by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson in cyberpunk literature. Were a digital double of the real world (or more likely a more attenuated digital version) provides for interactions in the virtual realm.

    Since then he has been applying his ingenuity and enterprise to academia  and futurism for the past decade and a half.

    The Playful World was written about a decade ago, yet was very prescient of today’s cutting-edge web and related technology trends:

    • Augmented web – the web provided a data overlay of the real world with applications like locative digital art and turn by turn directions for navigation. Putting this inside glasses rather than on a screen would mirror some of the human computer interaction work done since the 1960s for fighter pilots.
    • The web of things – items become intrinsically linked to the web with all the security risks that entails as well.
    • Custom manufacturing – smaller production runs, intellectual property becomes more important than manufacturing scale. Globalisation gets transformed. Waste could be reduced, though that would be affected by the kind of prototyping one goes through printing items in 3D printing from an existing file.
    • Gaming – lean forward entertainment becomes more immersive, though a lot of the growth in gaming has already happened

    Pesce knits his experiences together into an engaging narrative that would brings all of it together for the reader. If you want to get where things are going I recommend you have a read of Pesce’s book. You can find more book reviews here. More related content here.

  • New approach to China + more

    New approach to China

    Official Google Blog: A new approach to China – According to Google, IP theft from Google and Gmail being hacked prompted a new approach to China. That’s very reasonable on the face of it, especially given that the IP theft also affected several other companies as well. However Google is uniquely placed to take a new approach to China because it has lots of rewards and few downsides. Such as the fact that Google is under pressure in the US and not doing terribly well in the Chinese market due to credible local competition. Or as another outlet put it Google: Revenues From China Are ‘Immaterial’ | paidContent

    Consumer behaviour

    A Few Good Kids? | Mother Jones – interesting how marketing data is being used. It seems that more work needs to be done on the creative and the approach

    If Your 9-Year-Old Doesn’t Have a Cell Phone, He’s Not Socializing Enough – Fast Company

    What Do Baby Boomers Want From Technology? – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – some interesting progmatic attitudes to tech

    Media Cache – TV Still Has a Hold on Teenagers – NYTimes.com – Forrester survey of European teens. Conventional media still consumed

    Design

    Snow Peak Official Website – cool Japanese over-engineered camping stuff, love their Baja table out of solid aluminium and titanium cooking ware.

    Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font – I remember this font from my time at Corning Optical Fibres using the plant DEC VAX which provided my first email account

    Economics

    Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy. – By Daniel Gross and Win Rosenfeld – Slate Magazine

    Asia leading the way | Economist.com

    FT.com / World / Comment – Washington adapts to eastwards power shift

    FMCG

    Taste the Rainbow: Cigarette Makers’ Colorful Answer to FDA Packaging Regs | Advertising, Branding, and Marketing | Fast Company – tobacco companies use visual cues to make up for not being able to bill cigarettes as light, mild or low tar.

    How to

    Sleep success: How to make ZZZs = memory – life – 26 November 2009 – New Scientist

    Ideas

    Edge In Frankfurt: THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE by Frank Schirrmacher

    How reputation could save the Earth – opinion – 15 November 2009 – New Scientist – at first when I read this headline I thought someone in corporate communications had been going full belt at the magic mushrooms again. Instead the concept is a kind of green whuffie

    FT.com | Warfighting: The US Marine Corps on agility – interesting take on dealing with chaotic times

    Innovation

    Apple Patent Application Could Presage Thinner Devices – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com

    London

    FT.com | Olympics likely to harm UK tourism

    Luxury

    Cartier drops prices to woo young | The Japan Times Online – interesting move. I remember Armani doing a similar kind of thing with Armani Xchange in the early 1990s, it will be interesting to see the effect that it may have on the Cartier brand

    Media

    FT.com / Media – Disney boss tells Hollywood to rewrite script – internationalise content rather than assume a global media culture, develop online delivery platforms, cut costs, consolidate media franchises

    Online

    FT.com / China – Beijing tightens internet controls – “The internet is developing quickly, there are many loopholes in social management and maintaining social stability faces unprecedented new challenges,” said Meng Jianzhu, public security minister. “We must establish a comprehensive prevention and control social security system that covers the internet and the real world.”

    Retailing

    Retail outlook: Discounters best poised to thrive – USATODAY.com – US is seeing discounters thrive as well

    Security

    FT.com / UK – Watchdog probes sale of mobile phone records – take T-mobile’s licence away and shut them down

    Software

    Microsoft’s Future, Beyond Windows 7 and the PC – NYTimes.com – I can’t believe that the New York Times published this piece on Microsoft. Waggener Edstrom and Frank Shaw must have hit the roof when it came out. The mantra for Microsoft as a client is no surprises, I would be surprised if anyone walked willingly into this piece which eviscerates the corporate reputation

    Apocalypse Then: a two-part series on the lessons of Y2K. (1) – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine

    FT.com / Technology – Chinese court rules against Microsoft – infringed Zhongyi Electronics property rights.

    Technology

    The BBC is encrypting its HD signal by the back door | Technology | guardian.co.uk

    Cloud computing: Clash of the clouds | The Economist

    E.U. Takes More Time to Review Oracle-Sun Deal – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com – I hope that Sun Microsystems finds a safe harbour at Oracle

    The Digital Economy Bill is legislatively flawed | Left Foot Forward – piece that I co-authored with my pod neighbour Nick

    Web of no web

    AR to Realize World of Science Fiction — Nikkei Electronics Asia — November 2009 – good overview of augmented reality

    Wireless

    Daring Fireball: Oh Joe You Didn’t – interesting take on is or isn’t Apple earning more money on handsets than Nokia story that been doing the rounds on Twitter over the weekend