Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 216 09/07/2012
I'm writing this column at my desk in Italy, on a balmy evening, watching fireflies drift in and out among the vines. (I thought I'd see, as an experiment, whether I could type that sentence without smirking, but the reflection in my window pane says I've failed...) Seriously though, putting all climatological disparities aside, our existence here is a remarkable testament to advances in comms technology over the last few years. Communication with the rest of the world happens through a Telecom Italia Mobile mast on the mountain opposite, via which my laptop and my partner Marion's iPad are connected on pay-as-you-go mobile data plans. These are now fast enough to watch live streamed television, listen to music and radio, without recourse to the huge and expensive satellite dishes that were required just a couple of years ago. And my ALICE package gives me unlimited data for €19 per month.
Being here has given me the opportunity to get to grips with the iPad, and hence caused me to oscillate wildly between very impressed indeed and hair-tearing frustration. The latter state is almost always induced either by lack of documentation, or by Apple's smug assumption that everyone buys into its total ecosystem, which I most certainly do not. A most egregious example of the latter concerned Marion's contacts information, which it fell my duty to transfer from her netbook back in London into the iPad's Contacts. For purely historical reasons these have been kept for many years in Palm Desktop rather than Outlook (and she's quite happy with its facilities). When the iPad first arrived I realised there wasn't going to be any direct way to export addresses to it, because its Contacts Book appears to lack any menu for importing stuff. So I opened a Gmail account for her and successfully exported them all into that via a CSV file, believing job done. Fat chance. The Apple Contacts Book of course lacks any mechanism for importing from the enemy GMail either. After hours of footling around I gave up and suggested she log onto Gmail via Safari to see her contacts.
Months passed and a friend loaned us a book called "iPad 2: the missing manual" which solved many puzzles, like how to recover when you've accidentally locked the screen orientation into portrait. One chapter began with the soothing words "Putting a copy of your contacts file onto your iPad is easy" and suggested using either iCloud or iTunes. Like an idiot I decided iTunes would be easier since it was already installed there on the iPad's home screen. More head-scratching followed because iTunes would do nothing but offer to sell me David Guetta albums.
I'm embarassed to tell how many hours it took me to realise that iTunes has to be installed on another computer (assumed to be a Mac) rather than the iPad for this task. I flirted briefly with the idea of polluting my Viao with the Apple software, but fortunately took the precaution of Googling "uninstall iTunes from Windows 7" before committing: dozens of horror stories about how much junk it leaves behind cured me completely of that impulse. I Googled some more and then suddenly the scales were removed from my eyes by a sane and crystal-clear blog called "Apple iPad Tablet Help". The answer is use iCloud stupid!
It took about ten minutes once that penny dropped. Pull up GMail on my Viao; log out as me and log back in as Marion; export her GMail contacts to a vCard file on the Viao; go to www.icloud.com and log in with Marion's Apple ID; drag the downloaded .VCF file onto the Contacts icon in the iCloud window. During this whole procedure the iPad remained lying on a table in the other room and no cables were involved. I fetched the iPad and opened Contacts, where to my disappointment were just those three entries I'd added manually months before. But before I could even muster a curse, up popped another, then another and in they all streamed over the airwaves, all 1200+ of them, in less than a minute. The moral of the story for me is that The Cloud just works: feeble documentation, different OSes, squabbles between Apple and Google, smug assumptions that iPad owners have a Mac too, all just melted away in the universality of HTTP and the internet.
This was the same month we finally decided to adopt Dropbox in place of Dennis Publishing's own server to transport Real World copy, and so far it's proving more convenient and reliable for all concerned. The Cloud just works. (Of course being a cynic/paranoiac I download it all to archive on my local machine too). For extra cloudiness I've also recently built an archive of all my previous Idealog columns from 1994 to 2012 in Blogger, where you can read them on-screen in a nice convenient format. As I was uploading one from August 1996 its headline, Wake Me When It All Works, caught my eye. In it I complained: "Somewhere along the line everyone seems to have forgotten once again that simplifying means actually removing stuff, not just hiding it on the ninteenth tab of some dialog". I believe I can smell the coffee...
[Dick Pountain's back issues of this Idealog column are now readable on http://www.dickpountain-idealog.blogspot.it/]
Thursday, 31 January 2013
LOOKIN' GOOD!
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 215 07/06/2012
I just upgraded my mobile phone from a ZTE San Francisco to a ZTE San Francisco 2 and it's a significant improvement. It has a faster processor, a far better camera with flash, and it runs a later version of Android. But most important of all, it doesn't have those two chrome strips down either side. "Er, is he going soft in the head"? you may be thinking. Well no, I don't actually give a damn about those chrome strips, but most of the online reviews of this phone I've read mentioned them in their first paragraph. It appears (geddit), that people are becoming as obsessed with the appearance of their gadgets as they already are with their haircuts, clothes, cars and sofas. And it's not only physical gadgets like phones but also software interfaces. I'd love to write a smug, judgmental column that argues everyone else is obsessed with appearances whereas I just don't care about such trivia, only the deepest essences of things. I'd love to, but in all honesty I can't, because I'm no better than anyone else in this respect. I don't give a damn about those particular chrome strips, but I'm fanatical about software user interfaces and have dumped many perfectly functional utilities because I couldn't stand the cut (or colour scheme) of their jib.
This phenomenon is not of course confined to the IT business. Reflect for a moment about the explosion of interest in all areas of design - from consumer goods to architecture and engineering - over the last three decades or so. Apple design guru Jonathon Ives was just knighted, while architects nowadays have the celebrity status of movie stars. This is a real social phenomenon, and it's of far more than just sociological interest because its economic consequences are profound. How many new car models failed because a consensus emerged that they looked awful (and I don't JUST mean the Sinclair C5, that's a lazy choice: there's also the BL Mini Metro, especially in that unique poo-brown paintjob). The plain fact is that everyone's a critic and aesthete nowadays, with major consequences for industries (both consumer and technical) that can hardly be overestimated. If you produce something that potential users find ugly you're in big trouble, and in areas like computer or phone operating systems, where development budgets run into the billions, that can matter a great deal. Which explains the almost comically paranoid behaviour of certain big IT companies, because some of the design decisions involved are now too big for mere mortals to make without going a little bit mad.
Two of these terrible quandaries are examined by RWC columnists in this very issue. Jon Honeyball writes about Microsoft's dithering over the look-and-feel of Windows 8, which is approaching Hamlet-like proportions. Redmond chickened-out from incorporating the final look into the Release Candidate build and Jon suspects this is because they're panicking, still trying out different tie-and-handkerchief combinations on secret focus groups. Locked in a death struggle with Apple's iPad, the stakes are too high to get it wrong, but the decision is too big for anyone's sanity. We do know that they've dumped the "Aero-glass" theme for window borders they so proudly introduced with Windows Vista, describing it as now "dated and cheesy" and certainly not "en vogue". (Interpreted, that means we're terrified that YOU think it's cheesy, and we want to get our capitulation in before your attack). Actually I like the Aero look, as indeed I like cheese, but there's a certain grim irony in this situation because it was Microsoft who started the whole trend 20-years ago, fussing over the look-and-feel of early Windows versions, being first to hire big-bucks graphic designers and useability teams.
Meanwhile in his column Simon Jones describes a user revolt among programmers over the colour-scheme in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Its designers decided to remove most colour from its user interface, substituting small indecipherable monochrome icons and menu options in ALL CAPITALS. I'm hardly surprised developers are on the warpath. Programming is the worst area (except perhaps for writing) to radically fiddle with user interfaces: those hypnotically repetitive loops of edit, compile, run, edit, compile, run are only made tolerable because you've totally internalised the position of every single button and option, so your fingers run on autopilot without conscious intervention. Upset that rhythm and productivity may be ruined for months until you've internalised the new set. The designers may have been right and that too much colour was distracting - doesn't matter when people are adapted to that distraction.
For similar reasons I personally loathe Facebook's imposition of the new Timeline, which depresses me because my profile is now 34 feet long and extends below the floorboards. I've always hated Facebook's interface anyway, but had just about achieved immunity. And the iPad's lack of a hardware back-button still makes me swear ten times a day, another design decision taken for the sake of elegance over utility. (I'll probably get challenged to a duel for saying that). Judging by appearance is here to stay and manufacturers know it, leaving them with only two choices: either get really good at giving us what we didn't know we wanted, like Ives, or else let us customise to our eyes content.
I just upgraded my mobile phone from a ZTE San Francisco to a ZTE San Francisco 2 and it's a significant improvement. It has a faster processor, a far better camera with flash, and it runs a later version of Android. But most important of all, it doesn't have those two chrome strips down either side. "Er, is he going soft in the head"? you may be thinking. Well no, I don't actually give a damn about those chrome strips, but most of the online reviews of this phone I've read mentioned them in their first paragraph. It appears (geddit), that people are becoming as obsessed with the appearance of their gadgets as they already are with their haircuts, clothes, cars and sofas. And it's not only physical gadgets like phones but also software interfaces. I'd love to write a smug, judgmental column that argues everyone else is obsessed with appearances whereas I just don't care about such trivia, only the deepest essences of things. I'd love to, but in all honesty I can't, because I'm no better than anyone else in this respect. I don't give a damn about those particular chrome strips, but I'm fanatical about software user interfaces and have dumped many perfectly functional utilities because I couldn't stand the cut (or colour scheme) of their jib.
This phenomenon is not of course confined to the IT business. Reflect for a moment about the explosion of interest in all areas of design - from consumer goods to architecture and engineering - over the last three decades or so. Apple design guru Jonathon Ives was just knighted, while architects nowadays have the celebrity status of movie stars. This is a real social phenomenon, and it's of far more than just sociological interest because its economic consequences are profound. How many new car models failed because a consensus emerged that they looked awful (and I don't JUST mean the Sinclair C5, that's a lazy choice: there's also the BL Mini Metro, especially in that unique poo-brown paintjob). The plain fact is that everyone's a critic and aesthete nowadays, with major consequences for industries (both consumer and technical) that can hardly be overestimated. If you produce something that potential users find ugly you're in big trouble, and in areas like computer or phone operating systems, where development budgets run into the billions, that can matter a great deal. Which explains the almost comically paranoid behaviour of certain big IT companies, because some of the design decisions involved are now too big for mere mortals to make without going a little bit mad.
Two of these terrible quandaries are examined by RWC columnists in this very issue. Jon Honeyball writes about Microsoft's dithering over the look-and-feel of Windows 8, which is approaching Hamlet-like proportions. Redmond chickened-out from incorporating the final look into the Release Candidate build and Jon suspects this is because they're panicking, still trying out different tie-and-handkerchief combinations on secret focus groups. Locked in a death struggle with Apple's iPad, the stakes are too high to get it wrong, but the decision is too big for anyone's sanity. We do know that they've dumped the "Aero-glass" theme for window borders they so proudly introduced with Windows Vista, describing it as now "dated and cheesy" and certainly not "en vogue". (Interpreted, that means we're terrified that YOU think it's cheesy, and we want to get our capitulation in before your attack). Actually I like the Aero look, as indeed I like cheese, but there's a certain grim irony in this situation because it was Microsoft who started the whole trend 20-years ago, fussing over the look-and-feel of early Windows versions, being first to hire big-bucks graphic designers and useability teams.
Meanwhile in his column Simon Jones describes a user revolt among programmers over the colour-scheme in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Its designers decided to remove most colour from its user interface, substituting small indecipherable monochrome icons and menu options in ALL CAPITALS. I'm hardly surprised developers are on the warpath. Programming is the worst area (except perhaps for writing) to radically fiddle with user interfaces: those hypnotically repetitive loops of edit, compile, run, edit, compile, run are only made tolerable because you've totally internalised the position of every single button and option, so your fingers run on autopilot without conscious intervention. Upset that rhythm and productivity may be ruined for months until you've internalised the new set. The designers may have been right and that too much colour was distracting - doesn't matter when people are adapted to that distraction.
For similar reasons I personally loathe Facebook's imposition of the new Timeline, which depresses me because my profile is now 34 feet long and extends below the floorboards. I've always hated Facebook's interface anyway, but had just about achieved immunity. And the iPad's lack of a hardware back-button still makes me swear ten times a day, another design decision taken for the sake of elegance over utility. (I'll probably get challenged to a duel for saying that). Judging by appearance is here to stay and manufacturers know it, leaving them with only two choices: either get really good at giving us what we didn't know we wanted, like Ives, or else let us customise to our eyes content.
Thursday, 15 November 2012
UNDER THE OLD WHIFFLETREE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 214 11/05/2012
It all started when I was asked to write a preface for a new book on the history of Dennis Publishing, which required reminiscing about our start in the early 1970s. That triggered memories of the way we put magazines together back then: type the copy on an IBM Selectric "golfball" composer, cut it up into strips with scalpels and stick it down on the page with hot wax. The smell of that hot wax and the machine-gun rattle of the IBM came flooding back.
That prompted me to look up IBM Selectric on this new fangled Web thingy, where I soon stumbled across a neat little video clip by engineer Bill Hammack (http://www.up-video.com/v/57042,ibm-selectric-typewriter-.html) which shows how that unforgettable sound arose, but more importantly explains that the IBM golfball mechanism contained a fiendishly cunning example of a mechanical digital-to-analog converter. The problem that needed solving was to rotate an almost spherical print-head around two different axes, to position the correct character over the paper - unlike older typewriters, this print-head moved while the paper stood still (as in all modern computer printers which it foreshadowed). Rotation control involved adding together two digital "signals", using four bits to specify the tilt and 22 bits to specify rotation around the vertical axis, which originated as depressions of keys on the keyboard and were then transmitted via cables like those used to change gears on a bicycle. The mechanism that performed this addition went by the glorious name of a "whiffletree" (or whippletree). Now I was hooked.
Googling for whiffletree produced a total surprise. This mechanism has been known since at least the Middle Ages, perhaps even in the ancient world, as a method for harnessing horses to a plough! It solves the problem of various horses pulling with different strengths, by adding together and averaging their pulls onto the plough. It's a "tree" in exactly the same way a directory tree is: each *pair* of horses is harnessed to a horizontal wooden bar, then all these bars get connected to a larger bar and so on (a big team might require three levels). The pivot links between bars can be put into one of several of holes to "program" the whiffletree's addition sum: if the lead horse is pulling twice as hard as the others, put its pivot at the two-thirds mark. Without a diagram it's hard to convey just how damned elegant this mechanism is.
As an aside, at this point I ought to tell you that my first ever brush with computing happened in the sixth-form at school in 1961, as part of a team that built an electronic analog computer from RAF surplus radar components to enter a county prize competition. It could solve sixth-order differential equations in real-time (for instance to emulate the swing of pendulum that travels partially through oil) and we programmed it by plugging cables into a patch-panel, like an old-fashioned synthesiser or telephone switchboard.
In thrall to the whiffletree, I wondered where else such ingenious devices have been used, and that lead me straight to Naval gunnery controllers. Throughout WWII and right up into the 1970s, American warships were fitted with electro-mechanical fire control systems that worked on a principle not unlike the IBM Golfball. An enemy plane is approaching, your radar/sonar system is telling you from which direction, keep the anti-aircraft gun pointed in such directions that its stream of shells intercepts the moving plane's path. This problem was solved continuously in real-time, by gears, levers, cables and a few valves.
Ever since Alan Turing's 1936 seminal paper we've known that digital computers can imitate anything such mechanical or electrical analog devices can do, but sometimes there's little advantage in doing so. We used to be surrounded by simple analog computers, especially in our cars, and still are to a lesser extent. One that's long gone was the carburettor, which slid needles of varying taper through nozzles to compute a ferociously complex function relating petrol/air ratio to engine load. One that remains is the camshaft, whose varying cam profiles compute a similar function to control valve timing. A less obvious one is the humble wind-screen wiper, whose blade is actually attached via a whiffletree to spread the torque from the motor evenly along its length.
Just as my analog nostalgia was starting to wane, I turned on BBC 4 last night and watched a documentary about the Antikythera mechanism, an enigmatic bronze device of ancient Greek origin that was found on the sea-bed by pearl divers in 1900. Over fifty years of scientific investigation have revealed that this was a mechanical analog computer, almost certainly designed by Archimedes himself, whose rear face accurately calculated the dates of future solar and lunar eclipses, and front face was an animated display of the then-known-planets' orbits around the sun. It worked using around 70 hand-cut bronze gears with up to 253 teeth each. We're constantly tempted toward hubris concerning our extraordinary recent advances in digital technology, but once you've allowed for some four hundred years of cumulative advances in chemistry and solid-state physics, it ought to be quite clear that those ancient Greeks possessed every bit as much sheer human ingenuity as we do. And look what happened to them...
It all started when I was asked to write a preface for a new book on the history of Dennis Publishing, which required reminiscing about our start in the early 1970s. That triggered memories of the way we put magazines together back then: type the copy on an IBM Selectric "golfball" composer, cut it up into strips with scalpels and stick it down on the page with hot wax. The smell of that hot wax and the machine-gun rattle of the IBM came flooding back.
That prompted me to look up IBM Selectric on this new fangled Web thingy, where I soon stumbled across a neat little video clip by engineer Bill Hammack (http://www.up-video.com/v/57042,ibm-selectric-typewriter-.html) which shows how that unforgettable sound arose, but more importantly explains that the IBM golfball mechanism contained a fiendishly cunning example of a mechanical digital-to-analog converter. The problem that needed solving was to rotate an almost spherical print-head around two different axes, to position the correct character over the paper - unlike older typewriters, this print-head moved while the paper stood still (as in all modern computer printers which it foreshadowed). Rotation control involved adding together two digital "signals", using four bits to specify the tilt and 22 bits to specify rotation around the vertical axis, which originated as depressions of keys on the keyboard and were then transmitted via cables like those used to change gears on a bicycle. The mechanism that performed this addition went by the glorious name of a "whiffletree" (or whippletree). Now I was hooked.
Googling for whiffletree produced a total surprise. This mechanism has been known since at least the Middle Ages, perhaps even in the ancient world, as a method for harnessing horses to a plough! It solves the problem of various horses pulling with different strengths, by adding together and averaging their pulls onto the plough. It's a "tree" in exactly the same way a directory tree is: each *pair* of horses is harnessed to a horizontal wooden bar, then all these bars get connected to a larger bar and so on (a big team might require three levels). The pivot links between bars can be put into one of several of holes to "program" the whiffletree's addition sum: if the lead horse is pulling twice as hard as the others, put its pivot at the two-thirds mark. Without a diagram it's hard to convey just how damned elegant this mechanism is.
As an aside, at this point I ought to tell you that my first ever brush with computing happened in the sixth-form at school in 1961, as part of a team that built an electronic analog computer from RAF surplus radar components to enter a county prize competition. It could solve sixth-order differential equations in real-time (for instance to emulate the swing of pendulum that travels partially through oil) and we programmed it by plugging cables into a patch-panel, like an old-fashioned synthesiser or telephone switchboard.
In thrall to the whiffletree, I wondered where else such ingenious devices have been used, and that lead me straight to Naval gunnery controllers. Throughout WWII and right up into the 1970s, American warships were fitted with electro-mechanical fire control systems that worked on a principle not unlike the IBM Golfball. An enemy plane is approaching, your radar/sonar system is telling you from which direction, keep the anti-aircraft gun pointed in such directions that its stream of shells intercepts the moving plane's path. This problem was solved continuously in real-time, by gears, levers, cables and a few valves.
Ever since Alan Turing's 1936 seminal paper we've known that digital computers can imitate anything such mechanical or electrical analog devices can do, but sometimes there's little advantage in doing so. We used to be surrounded by simple analog computers, especially in our cars, and still are to a lesser extent. One that's long gone was the carburettor, which slid needles of varying taper through nozzles to compute a ferociously complex function relating petrol/air ratio to engine load. One that remains is the camshaft, whose varying cam profiles compute a similar function to control valve timing. A less obvious one is the humble wind-screen wiper, whose blade is actually attached via a whiffletree to spread the torque from the motor evenly along its length.
Just as my analog nostalgia was starting to wane, I turned on BBC 4 last night and watched a documentary about the Antikythera mechanism, an enigmatic bronze device of ancient Greek origin that was found on the sea-bed by pearl divers in 1900. Over fifty years of scientific investigation have revealed that this was a mechanical analog computer, almost certainly designed by Archimedes himself, whose rear face accurately calculated the dates of future solar and lunar eclipses, and front face was an animated display of the then-known-planets' orbits around the sun. It worked using around 70 hand-cut bronze gears with up to 253 teeth each. We're constantly tempted toward hubris concerning our extraordinary recent advances in digital technology, but once you've allowed for some four hundred years of cumulative advances in chemistry and solid-state physics, it ought to be quite clear that those ancient Greeks possessed every bit as much sheer human ingenuity as we do. And look what happened to them...
PUBLISH AND BE DROWNED
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 213: 12/04/2012
A couple of years ago I became quite keen on the idea of publishing my own book on the Web. I got as far as opening PayPal and Google Checkout accounts and setting up a dummy download page on my website to see whether their payment widgets worked. In the end I didn't proceed because I came to realise that though publishing myself minimised costs (no trees need die, no publisher's share taken), the chance of my rather arcane volume becoming visible amid the Babel of the internet also hovered around zero, even if I devoted much of my time to tweaking and twiddling and AdSensing. What's more the internet is so price-resistant that charging even something reasonable like £2 was likely to deter all-comers. But perhaps the real cause of my retreat was that not having a tangible book just felt plain wrong. It's possible I'll try again via the Kindle Store, but I feel no great urgency.
I'm not alone in this lack of enthusiasm: the fact that mainstream book publishers still vastly overcharge for their e-books suggests their commitment is equally tepid (I recently bought Pat Churchland's "Braintrust" in print for £1 less than the Kindle edition). I'm well versed in Information Theory and fully understand that virtual and paper editions have identical information content but, as George Soros reminded us again recently, economics isn't a science and economic actors are not wholly rational. The paper version of a book just is worth more to me than the e-version, both as a reader and as an author. I really don't want to pay more than £1 for an e-book, but I also don't want to write a book that sells for only £1, and that's all there is to it.
As Tom Arah ruefully explains in his Web Applications column this month, the ideal of a Web where everyone becomes their own author is moving further away rather than nearer, as Adobe dumps mobile Flash after Microsoft fails to support it in Windows 8 Metro. It's precisely the sort of contradictory thinking that afflicts me that helped firms like Apple monopolise Web content by corralling everything through its walled-garden gate. The Web certainly does enable people to post their own works, in much the same way as the Sahara Desert enables people to erect their own statues: what's the use dragging them across the dunes if no-one can find them.
There's always a chance your work will go viral of course but only if it's the right sort of work, preferably with a cat in it (in this sense nothing much has changed since Alan Coren's merciless 1976 parody of the paperback market "Golfing for Cats" - with a swastika on the cover). The truth is that the internet turns out to be a phenomenally efficient way to organise meaningless data, but if you're bothered about meaning or critical judgement it's not nearly so hot (whatever happened to the Semantic Web?) This has nothing to do with taste or intelligence but is a purely structural property of the way links work. All the political blogs I follow display long lists of links to other recommended blogs, but the overlap between these is almost zero and the result is total overload. I regularly contribute to the Guardian's "Comment Is Free" forums but hate that they offer no route for horizontal communication between different articles on related topics. Electronic media invariably create trunk/branch/twig hierarchies where everyone ends up stuck on their own twig.
If the Web has a structural tendency to individualise and atomise, this can be counteracted by institutions like forums and groups that pull humans back together again to share critical judgments. Writing a novel or a poem may best be done alone, but publishing a magazine requires the coordinated efforts and opinions of a whole group of people. A musician *can* now create professional results on their own in the back-bedroom, but they might have more fun and play better on a stage, or in a studio, with other people. The success of a site like Stumblr shows that people are desperate for anything that can filter and concentrate the stuff they like out from the great flux of nonsense that the Web is becoming. The great virtue of sites like Flickr and SoundCloud is that they offer a platform on which to display your efforts before a selected audience of people with similar interests, who are willing and able to judge your work. Merely connecting people together is not enough.
The billion dollars Facebook just paid for Instagram perhaps doesn't look so outrageous once you understand that it wasn't really technology but savvy and enthusiastic users - the sort Facebook wishes it was creating but isn't because it's too big, too baggy and too unorganised - that it was purchasing. It will be interesting to see how their enthusiasm survives the takeover. The Web is a potent force for democratising and levelling, but it's far from clear yet how far that's compatible with discovering and nurturing unevenly-distributed talent. If publishers have a future at all, it lies in learning to apply such skills as they have in that department to the raging torrent of content.
A couple of years ago I became quite keen on the idea of publishing my own book on the Web. I got as far as opening PayPal and Google Checkout accounts and setting up a dummy download page on my website to see whether their payment widgets worked. In the end I didn't proceed because I came to realise that though publishing myself minimised costs (no trees need die, no publisher's share taken), the chance of my rather arcane volume becoming visible amid the Babel of the internet also hovered around zero, even if I devoted much of my time to tweaking and twiddling and AdSensing. What's more the internet is so price-resistant that charging even something reasonable like £2 was likely to deter all-comers. But perhaps the real cause of my retreat was that not having a tangible book just felt plain wrong. It's possible I'll try again via the Kindle Store, but I feel no great urgency.
I'm not alone in this lack of enthusiasm: the fact that mainstream book publishers still vastly overcharge for their e-books suggests their commitment is equally tepid (I recently bought Pat Churchland's "Braintrust" in print for £1 less than the Kindle edition). I'm well versed in Information Theory and fully understand that virtual and paper editions have identical information content but, as George Soros reminded us again recently, economics isn't a science and economic actors are not wholly rational. The paper version of a book just is worth more to me than the e-version, both as a reader and as an author. I really don't want to pay more than £1 for an e-book, but I also don't want to write a book that sells for only £1, and that's all there is to it.
As Tom Arah ruefully explains in his Web Applications column this month, the ideal of a Web where everyone becomes their own author is moving further away rather than nearer, as Adobe dumps mobile Flash after Microsoft fails to support it in Windows 8 Metro. It's precisely the sort of contradictory thinking that afflicts me that helped firms like Apple monopolise Web content by corralling everything through its walled-garden gate. The Web certainly does enable people to post their own works, in much the same way as the Sahara Desert enables people to erect their own statues: what's the use dragging them across the dunes if no-one can find them.
There's always a chance your work will go viral of course but only if it's the right sort of work, preferably with a cat in it (in this sense nothing much has changed since Alan Coren's merciless 1976 parody of the paperback market "Golfing for Cats" - with a swastika on the cover). The truth is that the internet turns out to be a phenomenally efficient way to organise meaningless data, but if you're bothered about meaning or critical judgement it's not nearly so hot (whatever happened to the Semantic Web?) This has nothing to do with taste or intelligence but is a purely structural property of the way links work. All the political blogs I follow display long lists of links to other recommended blogs, but the overlap between these is almost zero and the result is total overload. I regularly contribute to the Guardian's "Comment Is Free" forums but hate that they offer no route for horizontal communication between different articles on related topics. Electronic media invariably create trunk/branch/twig hierarchies where everyone ends up stuck on their own twig.
If the Web has a structural tendency to individualise and atomise, this can be counteracted by institutions like forums and groups that pull humans back together again to share critical judgments. Writing a novel or a poem may best be done alone, but publishing a magazine requires the coordinated efforts and opinions of a whole group of people. A musician *can* now create professional results on their own in the back-bedroom, but they might have more fun and play better on a stage, or in a studio, with other people. The success of a site like Stumblr shows that people are desperate for anything that can filter and concentrate the stuff they like out from the great flux of nonsense that the Web is becoming. The great virtue of sites like Flickr and SoundCloud is that they offer a platform on which to display your efforts before a selected audience of people with similar interests, who are willing and able to judge your work. Merely connecting people together is not enough.
The billion dollars Facebook just paid for Instagram perhaps doesn't look so outrageous once you understand that it wasn't really technology but savvy and enthusiastic users - the sort Facebook wishes it was creating but isn't because it's too big, too baggy and too unorganised - that it was purchasing. It will be interesting to see how their enthusiasm survives the takeover. The Web is a potent force for democratising and levelling, but it's far from clear yet how far that's compatible with discovering and nurturing unevenly-distributed talent. If publishers have a future at all, it lies in learning to apply such skills as they have in that department to the raging torrent of content.
MUSIC MAESTRO PLEASE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 212 14/03/2012
I love music. By that I don't merely mean that I *like* music, and I don't mean that I write to a constant background of pop music from Spotify or the radio (on the contrary I can't write to music because I can't not listen so it distracts me). The kind of music I like is *good* music, by which I mean that ~1% of every genre that delivers the goods, that takes you away. It started in my teens with American rock and R&B (Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley), progressed through blues to jazz, then to classical (the links ran Charlie Parker to Bartok, back to Bach, then forward via Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy). Bluegrass, country, reggae, dubstep, Irish, Indian, just about anything as long as it's excellent. I play music too - guitar, bass guitar and dobro tolerably well, saxophone crudely - and I'm renowned among my friends for being able to extract a tune from any bizarre instrument I encounter, from conch shell to bamboo nose flute.
This being so, it's not surprising that over the years I've used computers to listen to music, to store music, to play music and even to compose music. As soon as I got a PC with a sound card I was writing programs, first in Basic, then in Forth, to play tunes on it, but perhaps because I play real non-keyboard instruments that aspect never really grabbed me - I've never owned a MIDI keyboard or other MIDI instrument. What did grab me was the challenge of trying to program the computer itself to generate sounds that might be accepted as music. Doing that from scratch is no mean feat because computers are completely without musical feeling, they have no sense of melody, harmony or rhythm, so you the human have to supply all that, one way or another.
The most obvious way is by creating an authoring platform that has the rules of some musical genre built-into it. There are dozens of sequencer-like apps available now that achieve this for various strains of dance music, since computers are really good at calculating complicated beat patterns. There's also Koan Pro, well-known to fans of Brian Eno (I'm not one), which provides an enormously complex grid on which you can compose abstract kinds of music by tweaking hundreds of parameters. I wrestled with it for some months many years ago, but something in its structure still lent everything I tried a regular, dance-like beat. My formative years were spent immersed in bebop, '60s free jazz and country blues, where beat is vital but flexible, springy, variable - Parker's lightning scales, Robert Johnson's frantic strums, a Danny Richmond drum flurry - and I wanted that sort of sprung-step feeling in my computer-generated music rather than a strict BPM metronome.
There was nothing for it but to build my own, so in the early '90s I wrote myself a MIDI generator. In those days Turbo Pascal was my language of choice and so I read the MIDI spec, deciphered the file format and wrote myself an API that let me output streams of valid MIDI events from a Pascal program. Then I wrote a library of functions that generate phrases, loops, rhythm patterns and other music elements. One crucial decision was not to represent whole notes but to separate pitch, duration and volume so programs could manipulate them separately. There were mathematical transforms to reverse or invert a tune, in the manner of Bach or John Adams. I composed "tunes" by expressing an algorithm in a short Pascal program, then compiling and running it to output a playable MIDI file. One early effort was based on the first 2000 prime numbers (my excuse; I'd just read "Godel, Escher, Bach"). These early tunes are feeble examples of then-fashionable minimalism, multi-part fugues that no human could play, sub-Adams experiments in phase shifting, piano pieces like Conlon Nancarrow on a very bad day.
Windows killed off Turbo Pascal and though I always meant to re-write an interactive version (that is, cutting out the intermediate MIDI file) in Delphi, I never got around to it. Later I fell for the charms of Ruby and planned to write an interactive composing platform in that: I still have the Gem containing the necessary MIDI interface, but that never happened either. What finally revived my interest was meeting a young American muso who turned me onto SoundCloud.com, which does for music what Flickr does for photos, and reading Philip Ball's superb book "The Music Instinct" which transformed my understanding of harmony by explaining it at both physical and physiological levels.
I can write Turbo Pascal better than ever by installing its command line compiler as a Tool in the excellent TextPad editor. MIDI remains MIDI and tools for mangling it are ten-a-penny. My latest efforts are closer to free-form jazz, Gil Evans on horse tranquilisers rather than Philip Glass. If you liked Frank Zappa, or the theme music from South Park, you might be able to tolerate them: if you lean more towards Adele or Michael Buble then (Health Warning) they might make you ill. And anyone who mentions Tubular Bells is asking for a punch up the 'froat.
[Dick Pountain hopes that the way to Carnegie Hall is via a FOR..NEXT loop, but isn't holding his breath. You can sample the tunes at http://snd.sc/Aumzot]
I love music. By that I don't merely mean that I *like* music, and I don't mean that I write to a constant background of pop music from Spotify or the radio (on the contrary I can't write to music because I can't not listen so it distracts me). The kind of music I like is *good* music, by which I mean that ~1% of every genre that delivers the goods, that takes you away. It started in my teens with American rock and R&B (Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley), progressed through blues to jazz, then to classical (the links ran Charlie Parker to Bartok, back to Bach, then forward via Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy). Bluegrass, country, reggae, dubstep, Irish, Indian, just about anything as long as it's excellent. I play music too - guitar, bass guitar and dobro tolerably well, saxophone crudely - and I'm renowned among my friends for being able to extract a tune from any bizarre instrument I encounter, from conch shell to bamboo nose flute.
This being so, it's not surprising that over the years I've used computers to listen to music, to store music, to play music and even to compose music. As soon as I got a PC with a sound card I was writing programs, first in Basic, then in Forth, to play tunes on it, but perhaps because I play real non-keyboard instruments that aspect never really grabbed me - I've never owned a MIDI keyboard or other MIDI instrument. What did grab me was the challenge of trying to program the computer itself to generate sounds that might be accepted as music. Doing that from scratch is no mean feat because computers are completely without musical feeling, they have no sense of melody, harmony or rhythm, so you the human have to supply all that, one way or another.
The most obvious way is by creating an authoring platform that has the rules of some musical genre built-into it. There are dozens of sequencer-like apps available now that achieve this for various strains of dance music, since computers are really good at calculating complicated beat patterns. There's also Koan Pro, well-known to fans of Brian Eno (I'm not one), which provides an enormously complex grid on which you can compose abstract kinds of music by tweaking hundreds of parameters. I wrestled with it for some months many years ago, but something in its structure still lent everything I tried a regular, dance-like beat. My formative years were spent immersed in bebop, '60s free jazz and country blues, where beat is vital but flexible, springy, variable - Parker's lightning scales, Robert Johnson's frantic strums, a Danny Richmond drum flurry - and I wanted that sort of sprung-step feeling in my computer-generated music rather than a strict BPM metronome.
There was nothing for it but to build my own, so in the early '90s I wrote myself a MIDI generator. In those days Turbo Pascal was my language of choice and so I read the MIDI spec, deciphered the file format and wrote myself an API that let me output streams of valid MIDI events from a Pascal program. Then I wrote a library of functions that generate phrases, loops, rhythm patterns and other music elements. One crucial decision was not to represent whole notes but to separate pitch, duration and volume so programs could manipulate them separately. There were mathematical transforms to reverse or invert a tune, in the manner of Bach or John Adams. I composed "tunes" by expressing an algorithm in a short Pascal program, then compiling and running it to output a playable MIDI file. One early effort was based on the first 2000 prime numbers (my excuse; I'd just read "Godel, Escher, Bach"). These early tunes are feeble examples of then-fashionable minimalism, multi-part fugues that no human could play, sub-Adams experiments in phase shifting, piano pieces like Conlon Nancarrow on a very bad day.
Windows killed off Turbo Pascal and though I always meant to re-write an interactive version (that is, cutting out the intermediate MIDI file) in Delphi, I never got around to it. Later I fell for the charms of Ruby and planned to write an interactive composing platform in that: I still have the Gem containing the necessary MIDI interface, but that never happened either. What finally revived my interest was meeting a young American muso who turned me onto SoundCloud.com, which does for music what Flickr does for photos, and reading Philip Ball's superb book "The Music Instinct" which transformed my understanding of harmony by explaining it at both physical and physiological levels.
I can write Turbo Pascal better than ever by installing its command line compiler as a Tool in the excellent TextPad editor. MIDI remains MIDI and tools for mangling it are ten-a-penny. My latest efforts are closer to free-form jazz, Gil Evans on horse tranquilisers rather than Philip Glass. If you liked Frank Zappa, or the theme music from South Park, you might be able to tolerate them: if you lean more towards Adele or Michael Buble then (Health Warning) they might make you ill. And anyone who mentions Tubular Bells is asking for a punch up the 'froat.
[Dick Pountain hopes that the way to Carnegie Hall is via a FOR..NEXT loop, but isn't holding his breath. You can sample the tunes at http://snd.sc/Aumzot]
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 211 07/02/2012
My partner, along with thousands of others, received an iPad for Christmas this year. She's fairly computerphobic (though copes with her Windows XP netbook) and so she's pretty pleased with the device, and I'd have to say that I am too. The minimal user interface works very well, and the clean graphics put current Android-based competitors to shame. I'd like a hardware Back button like Android's, and a USB port would be nice too, but as a portable email client and e-book reader it's hard to beat.
What I've learnt from my iPad experience so far is the significance of its large form factor. I've used plenty of touch screens before - Palm Pilots right from the 1996 launch and an Android phone for more than year - and I've even written simple apps for both, but I've never until now used an A4-sized touch-only device for any length of time. It's a game changer. Size really does matter. The reason is simple physiology: a mobile phone's screen is small enough to fall wholly within your visual attention zone, but an A4-sized screen is more like a magazine or newspaper page where attention can only take in one section at a time. That makes design into a battle to direct attention. Now there's quite a lot known about this class of problem, and if you're planning to write apps for full-sized tablet computers you'd do well to acquaint yourself with this knowledge.
Obviously cognitive scientists have been studying the subject for years, driven by the needs of the aviation and automobile industries to accomodate more and more instruments into cockpit displays. They need to strike the right balance between grabbing immediate attention for high-priority alerts while retaining appropriate visibility for stuff you need to monitor continually. Equally obviously there's a huge reservoir of expertise in the graphic design profession, especially in the magazine and news trade. We get a head start in iPad app design thanks to our in-house art people, but all the tools of the trade from "White Out Box" to "News in Brief" will need tweaking to become suitable for the tablet screen.
You can stumble across further lessons in attention-seeking in the oddest of places. Last week's Guardian Food Blog featured an article entitled "The hidden messages in menus: Some restaurant menus can tell the diner as much about themselves as what's for dinner". The gist was that researchers at San Francisco State University recently overturned conventional wisdom about restaurant menu design, which was that diners start to read at the middle of the right-hand column, then jump to top left and read downwards. This belief has governed where restaurants position their special offers for years, and hence directly affects their turnover, but eye-movement sensors showed the SFSU team that it's not true - in fact diners read menus just like any book, down from top left and up again. This may cause a boom among US local print shops, to reprint billions of menus. The rest of the article describes how professional menu designers can manipulate diners emotionally, making certain options feel like bargains, while others provoke cheapskate guilt or flatter generosity.
I'm currently reading a fascinating book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by a great guru of cognitive psychology, Daniel Kahneman, Princeton professor and Nobel laureate, in which he summarises a lifetime of study into the role of intuition in psychology. He's identified two independent thought mechanisms within the human brain. What he calls System 1 is intuitive, jumps to conclusions, is fast, amoral and fairly inaccurate: it's what saves us from hidden tigers and falling rocks. The other, System 2, is slower, deliberative, moral and responsible for self-restraint and future planning: it's who we think we are, though in fact System 1 is in charge most of the time. I already knew this because of my ability (which I'm sure I share with many others) to instantly re-find my place in a long text after taking a break - it only works if I *completely* trust where my eyes first fall, and if try to remember or think about it at all, it's lost. System 1 is also what makes me, temporarily, improve at darts or pool between my third and fourth pints. Kahneman's book is a goldmine of information about cognitive capabilities, delusions, illusions and misconceptions that ought to be a great help in UI design, given that System 1 is almost always in charge of such interactions.
A Windows PC is pretty much a System 2 device, its plethora of menus, tabs and control panels forcing you to think about what you're doing for much of the time. I don't mind that but it appears that millions of people do, hence the success of the iPad. In effect Apple's device is a portable laboratory for cognitive science experiments, controlled entirely by gesture and sub-concious perception. I expect the revolution in UI design that it provoked to develop in quite unexpected directions over the next few years, which should put a lot of the fun back into computing. Will I be buying my own iPad? Perhaps not, but I can now afford to wait till Android tab vendors get it right (which may take some while, to judge by present form).
My partner, along with thousands of others, received an iPad for Christmas this year. She's fairly computerphobic (though copes with her Windows XP netbook) and so she's pretty pleased with the device, and I'd have to say that I am too. The minimal user interface works very well, and the clean graphics put current Android-based competitors to shame. I'd like a hardware Back button like Android's, and a USB port would be nice too, but as a portable email client and e-book reader it's hard to beat.
What I've learnt from my iPad experience so far is the significance of its large form factor. I've used plenty of touch screens before - Palm Pilots right from the 1996 launch and an Android phone for more than year - and I've even written simple apps for both, but I've never until now used an A4-sized touch-only device for any length of time. It's a game changer. Size really does matter. The reason is simple physiology: a mobile phone's screen is small enough to fall wholly within your visual attention zone, but an A4-sized screen is more like a magazine or newspaper page where attention can only take in one section at a time. That makes design into a battle to direct attention. Now there's quite a lot known about this class of problem, and if you're planning to write apps for full-sized tablet computers you'd do well to acquaint yourself with this knowledge.
Obviously cognitive scientists have been studying the subject for years, driven by the needs of the aviation and automobile industries to accomodate more and more instruments into cockpit displays. They need to strike the right balance between grabbing immediate attention for high-priority alerts while retaining appropriate visibility for stuff you need to monitor continually. Equally obviously there's a huge reservoir of expertise in the graphic design profession, especially in the magazine and news trade. We get a head start in iPad app design thanks to our in-house art people, but all the tools of the trade from "White Out Box" to "News in Brief" will need tweaking to become suitable for the tablet screen.
You can stumble across further lessons in attention-seeking in the oddest of places. Last week's Guardian Food Blog featured an article entitled "The hidden messages in menus: Some restaurant menus can tell the diner as much about themselves as what's for dinner". The gist was that researchers at San Francisco State University recently overturned conventional wisdom about restaurant menu design, which was that diners start to read at the middle of the right-hand column, then jump to top left and read downwards. This belief has governed where restaurants position their special offers for years, and hence directly affects their turnover, but eye-movement sensors showed the SFSU team that it's not true - in fact diners read menus just like any book, down from top left and up again. This may cause a boom among US local print shops, to reprint billions of menus. The rest of the article describes how professional menu designers can manipulate diners emotionally, making certain options feel like bargains, while others provoke cheapskate guilt or flatter generosity.
I'm currently reading a fascinating book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by a great guru of cognitive psychology, Daniel Kahneman, Princeton professor and Nobel laureate, in which he summarises a lifetime of study into the role of intuition in psychology. He's identified two independent thought mechanisms within the human brain. What he calls System 1 is intuitive, jumps to conclusions, is fast, amoral and fairly inaccurate: it's what saves us from hidden tigers and falling rocks. The other, System 2, is slower, deliberative, moral and responsible for self-restraint and future planning: it's who we think we are, though in fact System 1 is in charge most of the time. I already knew this because of my ability (which I'm sure I share with many others) to instantly re-find my place in a long text after taking a break - it only works if I *completely* trust where my eyes first fall, and if try to remember or think about it at all, it's lost. System 1 is also what makes me, temporarily, improve at darts or pool between my third and fourth pints. Kahneman's book is a goldmine of information about cognitive capabilities, delusions, illusions and misconceptions that ought to be a great help in UI design, given that System 1 is almost always in charge of such interactions.
A Windows PC is pretty much a System 2 device, its plethora of menus, tabs and control panels forcing you to think about what you're doing for much of the time. I don't mind that but it appears that millions of people do, hence the success of the iPad. In effect Apple's device is a portable laboratory for cognitive science experiments, controlled entirely by gesture and sub-concious perception. I expect the revolution in UI design that it provoked to develop in quite unexpected directions over the next few years, which should put a lot of the fun back into computing. Will I be buying my own iPad? Perhaps not, but I can now afford to wait till Android tab vendors get it right (which may take some while, to judge by present form).
THE WALLS HAVE EARS
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 210 - 18/01/2012
I'm very far from being an online privacy nut. I don't pay for fancy password storage services, I often click buttons to give feedback or share things like playlists, and none of my time is spent ranting against Google and Facebook on online forums. However events over the last couple of weeks have possibly pushed me over some threshold of tolerance. But perhaps it's best if I tell the story from the beginning.
I went away for two weeks over the New Year, and made the stupid mistake of trying to be a responsible citizen by turning off all my electrical appliances before leaving. That included my BT broadband router, but when I returned last week I discovered that my internet service had not actually gone away entirely but was being throttled down to an unusable 200kbps, up and down. This has actually happened to me once before, last autumn after a far longer period of disuse, but that time it came back of its own accord overnight. This time it didn't and so on the second day I rang BT Broadband support to report a fault. I'm happy to report that both the Indian gentlemen who handled my problem were models of politeness and efficiency, displayed a full technical grasp of the problem, rang back when they promised and escalated the fault to its proper level. (Why BT permits it to happen in the first place is for a future column and isn't my topic here).
Once the engineers have reset your ADSL line it takes several days to re-train the local DSLAM before full speed is achieved again, and so I emailed our own RWC net guru Cassidy to gripe about things in general. He advised me to use the line heavily during the retraining process because "the more data it moves the more retrain info it has to go on". I thought for a while about the best way to achieve unattended line loading, and decided that Spotify, set to repeat the same playlist, is the easiest way for downloads while syncing a huge directory of photographs up to DropBox is a reasonable way to occupy the uplink overnight. That's when things started to get weird.
Next day I received an email from my sister in the far north of Scotland inquiring whether everything was all right. It read "Maggie Pountain commented on a playlist you listened to: András Schiff - Bach: Goldberg Variations. Maggie wrote: 'Haven't you turned this off or can't you sleep.'" She was clearly able to see what was playing on my Spotify account in real time, and worried because it hadn't changed for 12 hours or more. Next day I had more mails from various friends commenting on my listening habits, worried that I was becoming obsessed by Ravel and Debussy. Now much as I love Bach, Ravel and Debussy's piano music, I had of course chosen these particular playlists for their length rather than quality on this occasion, and was only actually listening in short bursts whenever I happened to be at the keyboard. The main point though was that, all of a sudden, everyone in the world seemed to know what I was listening to.
In my devil-may-care, I'm-not-a-privacy-nut mode I had indeed voluntarily agreed to link my Spotify and Facebook accounts so that friends could see and share my playlists (and vice versa), but that's not at all the same as everyone knowing what you're listening to right now in real time, which is decidedly creepy. Then I realised some of the friends who'd mailed weren't even on Facebook. I logged into my Spotify preferences, which I hadn't touched for several years, and discovered two tick boxes called "Share my activity on Spotify Social" and "Show what I listen to on Facebook" which I don't recall seeing before and which were both ticked. I unticked them both. A rootle around among the preferences also explained that "Private Session" option which had started to appear on the pull-down menu for my account: if you don't want everyone to see what you're listening to you can choose to make this session private, but the default is public and your private session will terminate each time you restart the Spotify client. This is pretty much the sort of behaviour that makes real privacy nuts rant against Facebook, and even if Spotify did catch the disease from Facebook that's really not any sort of an excuse.
I can't really say why people listening-in to what I'm playing right now is more disturbing to me than any of the similar stunts Facebook pulls, it just is. It's not as though I spend a lot of time furtively listening to Hitler's speeches, Lloyd-Webber musicals or porno-music (is there such a thing?), but music is important to me and my current choice feels far more intimate than, say, my political opinions, which I'm happy to share with anyone who'll stand still for long enough. A nagging feeling persists that this episode has tipped me over some threshold, into becoming an antisocial networker: I find myself ever more irritated with Facebook and have been poised on the verge of closing my account several times recently. Spotify though I can't do without.
I'm very far from being an online privacy nut. I don't pay for fancy password storage services, I often click buttons to give feedback or share things like playlists, and none of my time is spent ranting against Google and Facebook on online forums. However events over the last couple of weeks have possibly pushed me over some threshold of tolerance. But perhaps it's best if I tell the story from the beginning.
I went away for two weeks over the New Year, and made the stupid mistake of trying to be a responsible citizen by turning off all my electrical appliances before leaving. That included my BT broadband router, but when I returned last week I discovered that my internet service had not actually gone away entirely but was being throttled down to an unusable 200kbps, up and down. This has actually happened to me once before, last autumn after a far longer period of disuse, but that time it came back of its own accord overnight. This time it didn't and so on the second day I rang BT Broadband support to report a fault. I'm happy to report that both the Indian gentlemen who handled my problem were models of politeness and efficiency, displayed a full technical grasp of the problem, rang back when they promised and escalated the fault to its proper level. (Why BT permits it to happen in the first place is for a future column and isn't my topic here).
Once the engineers have reset your ADSL line it takes several days to re-train the local DSLAM before full speed is achieved again, and so I emailed our own RWC net guru Cassidy to gripe about things in general. He advised me to use the line heavily during the retraining process because "the more data it moves the more retrain info it has to go on". I thought for a while about the best way to achieve unattended line loading, and decided that Spotify, set to repeat the same playlist, is the easiest way for downloads while syncing a huge directory of photographs up to DropBox is a reasonable way to occupy the uplink overnight. That's when things started to get weird.
Next day I received an email from my sister in the far north of Scotland inquiring whether everything was all right. It read "Maggie Pountain commented on a playlist you listened to: András Schiff - Bach: Goldberg Variations. Maggie wrote: 'Haven't you turned this off or can't you sleep.'" She was clearly able to see what was playing on my Spotify account in real time, and worried because it hadn't changed for 12 hours or more. Next day I had more mails from various friends commenting on my listening habits, worried that I was becoming obsessed by Ravel and Debussy. Now much as I love Bach, Ravel and Debussy's piano music, I had of course chosen these particular playlists for their length rather than quality on this occasion, and was only actually listening in short bursts whenever I happened to be at the keyboard. The main point though was that, all of a sudden, everyone in the world seemed to know what I was listening to.
In my devil-may-care, I'm-not-a-privacy-nut mode I had indeed voluntarily agreed to link my Spotify and Facebook accounts so that friends could see and share my playlists (and vice versa), but that's not at all the same as everyone knowing what you're listening to right now in real time, which is decidedly creepy. Then I realised some of the friends who'd mailed weren't even on Facebook. I logged into my Spotify preferences, which I hadn't touched for several years, and discovered two tick boxes called "Share my activity on Spotify Social" and "Show what I listen to on Facebook" which I don't recall seeing before and which were both ticked. I unticked them both. A rootle around among the preferences also explained that "Private Session" option which had started to appear on the pull-down menu for my account: if you don't want everyone to see what you're listening to you can choose to make this session private, but the default is public and your private session will terminate each time you restart the Spotify client. This is pretty much the sort of behaviour that makes real privacy nuts rant against Facebook, and even if Spotify did catch the disease from Facebook that's really not any sort of an excuse.
I can't really say why people listening-in to what I'm playing right now is more disturbing to me than any of the similar stunts Facebook pulls, it just is. It's not as though I spend a lot of time furtively listening to Hitler's speeches, Lloyd-Webber musicals or porno-music (is there such a thing?), but music is important to me and my current choice feels far more intimate than, say, my political opinions, which I'm happy to share with anyone who'll stand still for long enough. A nagging feeling persists that this episode has tipped me over some threshold, into becoming an antisocial networker: I find myself ever more irritated with Facebook and have been poised on the verge of closing my account several times recently. Spotify though I can't do without.
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