I finally managed to import my old Wordpress blog into Evernote and upload the posts here. I managed to keep the dates, too, so the archives now stretch back into the past, all the way to posts that were originally created on Posterous before that went away.

Some of my favourite posts are below:

• All Software Sucks

• The joy of making up words

• Collisions

• On Piracy

To import your own Wordpress blog into Evernote you will need this script and a way to run Python. If you have a Mac, you’re already fine.

First export your posts from Wordpress. You’ll find the export and import options under "Tools" in your blog admin area. Then you’ll want to run the script. Launch Terminal, cd to wherever you saved the script, and run it like so:

 python wordpress.py -o evernote wordpress.xml

Replace
evernote
with the directory where you want your Evernote notebook created, and
wordpress.xml
with the name of your own exported XML file from Wordpress. This will result in a directory full of
.enex
files. Import the directory into Evernote (File > Import Notes).

You will still need to do some manual clean-up, especially of links between posts. Also some of the formatting can get messed up, and a few images got lost in my export and I had to re-add them manually into Evernote. It’s still better than doing it by hand!

My new-to-me car has an utterly annoying feature, where it will recommend changing up as soon as the engine is not actually at risk of stalling. With a straight, empty road, I decided to indulge it and see what would happen.

Tooling along in fifth, the revs were well shy of the 2k mark (I run a turbodiesel) and sure enough, I had a little 6^ in the middle of the dash to encourage me to shift up. The interesting thing to me was that the fuel consumption in fifth was about 5 litres per 100 km, while in sixth it shot up to nearly 10 l/100km. I made sure that the throttle was steady and I wasn’t otherwise affecting the results, but it was completely reproducible. As soon as I shifted back to fifth, fuel consumption dropped, and the car started nagging me to shift up.

This sort of thing is why I am suspicious of the current rush to Big Data. Unless you are very careful and you are sure you understand exactly what is going on, it would be very easy to get caught in exactly the same sort of trap and make wrong decisions.

This is of course assuming that other factors don’t come into play, further fudging the issue. In the case of my car, I suspect that somebody decided that having a shift-up indicator with its associated ecological do-gooder associations was more important than making sure that its advice was appropriate.

The corporate world can easily fall victim to the sindrome of "We need to do something! This is something - let’s do this!". Nothing is more frustrating than to hear that scarce resources have been squandered on some sort of wild-goose chase, instead of applied in the pursuit of a fully thought-out goal.

Far more projects have been sunk by an excess of mis-applied resources than by a straight lack of resources. Make sure that before you do anything, you know the goal that you are trying to achieve. Next, double-check that what you plan to do will move towards achieving that goal. Finally, make sure there isn’t something more important that needs to happen first. Hacking away on a feature that will benefit one or two customers is worth doing, but not at the expense of delaying the next version or cutting features that most customers care about.

Building features just for their own sake is also a quick way to get yourself caught on one horn of the Innovator’s Dilemma. Extra capabilities add complexity to your product, so you need to be sure that you have enough benefit to make the complexity trade-off worth your users’ while.

The easiest way of all to fall into this trap is to follow the herd. "But all our competitors have a hosted version!" So what? Do your customers want it? If you offered it, would they even be able to use it? If they do want it, do they want it today, or is it enough for them to know that you are working on it and will have it ready by the time they are ready for it?

Also, does it come in red?

Image by James Forbes via Unsplash

The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. [...] The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.

Isaac Asimov, "Visit to the World's Fair of 2014", 1964

I was interviewed a little while ago about how I used social media at work. I had been meaning to expand upon that post for a while, and today I finally got around to it.

I use social media a lot, because I live in a small city in northern Italy, so it would otherwise be impractical to try to keep up to date on what is going on elsewhere in my industry, let alone trying to join in that conversation. The thing is, there are many different media and different ways to use them. Here is how I do it.

Networks

Twitter

Find me on Twitter: @dwellington

Twitter is undoubtedly the power tool of social media. It’s good for talking shop, but also for just messing around. You can have conversations or flamewars, get help, get support, or be told to get lost. However, Twitter also has a fairly steep learning curve for first-time users. When you get started, you have an empty feed, and the initial suggestions of people to follow are unlikely to be helpful.

My suggestion is to find people you know in real life or from other media, and follow them. As you see what they post and who they interact with, you will branch out and start following others - and probably unfollowing some of your early follows. Don’t be shy about joining in conversations, either. Twitter is inherently public. However, don’t necessarily expect everyone to answer your @-mentions, especially at the beginning.

The value of Twitter builds slowly over time, and in proportion to the effort you put into it. As you prune the list of accounts you follow, watch hashtags, and build yourself lists, interesting content will start coming to you. If you have sufficient presence, people may also start bringing things to your attention proactively.

LinkedIn

Find me on LinkedIn

Many people consider LinkedIn as the online equivalent of a CV, updated only for major promotions or job changes. In actual fact there is a lot more to the service than that. You have the opportunity to build yourself a public track record of engagement on particular topics, which can be much more valuable and differentiating than simply having had a certain job title for a period of time. Share content that is relevant to your area, whether you wrote it yourself or found it online. The engagement from your network of contacts (likes, re-shares and comments) will tell you whether you are hitting the mark or not.

LinkedIn also lets you follow companies so that you keep up to date with what is going on at your prospects or competitors. The Pulse tool will give you a good idea of what’s hot right now across your network.

Google+

Find me on Google+

Google+ is an odd case. You can’t ignore it because it’s Google and so it’s searchable everywhere and what-not, but at least for me, there is little value there. Visually-oriented people seem to like it, so if that’s you, go nuts. For me, I find the text snippets to be exactly the wrong size for browsing, and the community is a bit lacking. However, especially if you blog, you will want to share your posts via G+ purely for the SEO value.

App.net

Find me on App.net: @dwelling

App.net was supposed to be the hip alternative to Twitter once Twitter was over-run by civilians. Initially it was only available for pay, which definitely gave it a clique-y atmosphere. Eventually it opened up a free tier, which I signed up for, but I have to admit I find its value extremely limited. If they decide to close down my free access, I won’t pay to be able to stay on.

To me, Foursquare and Facebook are exclusively for personal stuff, but I’m listing them for completeness.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a location-based social network which allows users to check in to locations. I use it mainly as an aide-memoire, so that when someone asks me several months later "what was the name of that cool café in Istanbul?", I can just scroll back in my check-in history and find out. I also use it to keep track of tips people give me, saving recommendations to the built-in to-do list.

Facebook

Facebook is private, for friends only - so no link. I’m in enterprise software, so my work content is not in the least relevant on Facebook. I use it to keep in touch with distant friends, and that’s pretty much it. If you’re doing something consumer-oriented, your mileage may vary.

Tools

Buffer

Buffer is a useful little tool that lets you share posts to a variety of social networks at once. I use it to cross-post, typically to Twitter and App.net, plus one of LinkedIn or Facebook. I generally have short sessions of social media use in between other tasks, so Buffer lets me distribute shares over time instead of having a spurt of activity followed by silence. Buffer also lets you schedule your posts for specific times, so you can target posts for times when e.g. people will be awake in Silicon Valley, or whichever time zone is relevant.

Newsle

Find me on Newsle

Newsle lets you follow people and get an alert whenever they’re in the news. It’s a good idea to follow prominent executives, founders, VCs, and the like to keep up with what is going on in the industry. You just set it and forget it; Newsle will e-mail you when there’s a match, and only then.

Evernote

Evernote is a fantastic cloud-based note-taking tool. If that doesn’t seem useful, you have a much less complicated life than me, for which I envy you. I use Evernote all the time and across all my devices. It lets me take notes immediately, it tags them automatically with locations and such, and lets me search past notes for context. It lets me set actions and reminders for follow-up directly in the note. It syncs to the cloud so the quick note I dash off on my phone can be edited at leisure using a proper keyboard on my MacBook Air and then reviewed on my iPad on the flight home. Sign up for a free account with the link above and we both get extra space.

As well as its main apps, available on any platform you care to name, Evernote also has a slew of related services which sync with its notebook and tag structure. Skitch is a drawing app for quick sketches which also lets you annotate PDFs. Hello is a business card scanner: take a picture of the business card with your iPhone, and it OCRs it and searches LinkedIn for matches. You can also enter notes for the conversation and be reminded of it in the future. The Web Clipper is a browser add-on that lets you send clips or entire web pages straight to Evernote. Finally, Postach.io is a blogging service which links to an Evernote notebook. To create a post, simply create a note, edit it as normal, using Markdown if you want to get fancy, and then tag it with "published".

Basic usage is free, but premium gets you all sorts of extra features which are well worth while. Put simply, Evernote is my go-to platform to organise my life.

Newsblur

Newsblur is the RSS reader I settled upon when Google Reader went away, taking with it the various services it underpinned. It gives you 64 sites for free, but I paid for the upgrade to get more sites, full-text posts, and other services.

Instapaper

Instapaper lets you save web pages for offline reading without formatting. That’s all it does, but it does it very well. Someone sends you an article that looks interesting but you don’t have time to read it right now? Forward it to Instapaper, and next time you’re in a queue or in the lift or whatever you can read the article on your phone. If you don’t finish it, you can pick it up from the same point on your iPad at home.

It can also be worth while to forward pages to Instapaper that have a reader-unfriendly presentation, since it strips out all extraneous formatting.

Nowadays Instapaper also supports video, further extending its usefulness to me.

Flipboard

In line with what I said earlier about interesting content coming to you, Flipboard is a magazine that is dynamically assembled for you on your iPad based on your interests. Give it your Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, add some specific sites that interest you, and let it do its magic. After a bit of training, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have several interesting reads for you every time you open the app.

I hope this will be helpful for someone. Ping me on any of the networks mentioned above if you want to continue the conversation.

Image by Chris Sardegna via Unsplash

I don’t call myself a feminist, because that requires more effort than I put into it. What I do is sort of Minimum Acceptable Standard Equality: basically I try not to be gratuitously insensitive. As part of that effort, I try to avoid gendered pronouns wherever I’m not actually referring to a person of a specific gender.

This is where that Minimum Acceptable Standard stuff comes in: I refuse to switch "he" for "she", because especially when it’s done by guys, this looks too much like the author is asking for a pat on the back. Plus we have a perfectly good non-gendered pronoun in English: "they". Denying the use of they just makes you look like a jerk.

So far so good; but what should we do in languages that are more strongly gendered than English? For instance, at a recent meeting held in Italian, I stumbled over the fact that I was describing "the user" (masculine in Italian grammar) to a female software developer.

Gendered languages have generally struggled with this issue. The closest English example would be something like actor/actress. Should a woman be an actor, or an actress? In particular, where a feminine version of a term had not been needed in the past, because women could not become ministers or directors or whatever, but rules exist to create it, should it be created, or should women adopt the masculine version? Different people have answered this in different ways in different places and times.

Now imagine that every single noun in your speech has this sort of issue associated with it… Bottom line, English speakers have it pretty easy, so there’s no excuse for not achieving at least the Minimum Acceptable Standard.

Image by Sebastian Muller via Unsplash

There was a strange mixture of hand-wringing and schadenfreude at the news that Tie Rack is to close down (The Times, BBC). In IT of course many people have had a relationship with ties of ambivalence at best. Traditionally, IT is divided into Suits and Beards, and techies pride themselves on not wearing ties. After all, they might get caught in intake fans, Incredibles-style:

Thing is, fewer and fewer techies work with hardware these days. If you’re hacking Ruby, you’re about as far removed from the hardware as it’s possible to get. In the other direction, the Suits have also stopped wearing ties, preferring blazers with open-collar shirts or even going the full Zuckerberg and showing up in T-shirts and hoodies.

In other words, the whole no-tie thing has definitively jumped the shark. You are no longer making any sort of statement by showing up tie-less; if anything, wearing a tie has become the provocative statement.

In fact, suits & ties are actually the ultimate nerd apparel. You have to put some effort into shopping, sure, and they tend to cost a bit more than a random vendor T-shirt and ancient combats, but the advantage is that you can thereafter completely forget about wondering what to wear. You can get dressed in the dark and be sure that the results will be perfectly presentable. If you want you can go to a little bit more effort and inject some personality into the process, but the great thing is that you don’t have to. By wearing a suit & tie, you lead people to pay attention to what you say and do, not to what you are wearing. And isn’t that the whole point?

This is why I was reassured to see plenty of ties this week at the Gartner Datacenter conference. Reports of the death of the tie have been greatly exaggerated.

Long live ties!

Working in cloud computing is extremely frustrating. Nobody outside the field understands what you do no matter how much you try to explain, and everybody in it thinks they already do before you get a chance to explain.

One of my favourite metaphors to try to break this impasse is to talk about fleets of aircraft. The Bad Old Way of doing things in IT is a bit like a company operating a huge fleet of private jets, one for each employee that ever needs to travel anywhere. Obviously extravagant and impractical, right? The planes are idle for much of the time while the people are doing whatever they travelled to do, and you can't easily make them bigger if you need to transport a larger team somewhere. The thing is, that's pretty much how we all approached IT until not so long ago: each workload got its own dedicated infrastructure, which was idle much of the time and very difficult to resize or reassign in response to changing requirements. Virtualization didn't really help, except as a band-aid over the problem.

Cloud computing is more like having lots of different commercial carriers, each with different classes of service, routes, amenities and other offerings, with passengers (workloads) choosing supplier and service based on their requirements of the moment.

As much as it is about anything, cloud computing is about impermanence. When you buy physical hardware, you own it, it's right there. The canonical definition of hardware is "the part that you can kick". (Software, then, is the part that makes you want to kick the hardware.) These days, people who like their IT to be tangible are disparaged as "server huggers". The whole point of cloud computing is that if something breaks you don't worry about trying to fix it, you just get a new one, which will be the same as the original. Randy Bias coined the phrase "cattle, not pets": you don't give the servers names and pamper them as individuals, you give them numbers and put them down as soon as it's convenient.

The dark side of this impermanence, though, is: what happens to the data in this new world of transience? When your cloud provider shuts down, what happens to everything that you entrusted them with over the years? What happens when data disappears?

It’s a nightmare for libraries. What do you do if you’re given a chunk of priceless digital manuscripts - stored on totally obsolete media? The trove might include video games by Timothy Leary and digital drawings by Keith Haring, or versions of famous Broadway shows, or, well, anything really.

On the other hand, the cloud can also be the solution. If you need to read a document created on some obsolete system that you no longer own or can even buy, perhaps you can emulate it in the cloud. JSMESS is a project to port the MESS emulator to Javascript so that it will run in a browser. Right now it will emulate thirty-year-old kit with middling results, but as is the way of things, I have little doubt that before too long it will be able to emulate Windows 95 running Word Whatever.

Why do you care? We are now living through what will doubtlessly be known as a Dark Age to future historians. A relative of mine wrote a book about his experiences in South Africa around the turn of the Twentieth Century. I doubt there are many copies around, but the family has one, and so I was able to read about how my relative was there for the founding of some of the institutions of modern South Africa, and his efforts to make it a better place.

It is very hard to imagine that happening today. Nobody keeps a physical written diary that could be found in an attic, we write about our daily experiences on Facebook. Even when we do have local documents, they are saved in particular formats that will be very difficult or impossible to read a handful of years from now, never mind a century on. Version requirements, compatibility and dependencies, not to mention digital rights management, will see to that.

Imagine though if you come across a trove of Grandpa's ancient backups, and you could boot something up right in your browser to read them. You might solve that inheritance dispute, or smile at his old love letters to Grandma.

Imagine if you're in charge of a business and you suddenly realise you can't access your documents that are more than a few years old. What does that do to your billing, your credibility, not to mention your legal liability? Sure, you can print everything off and ship it to Iron Mountain or wherever, but the latency on accessing data held in that kind of facility would give your average Millenial conniptions.

If you're a developer or a provider building something for the cloud - which these days means all providers and developers who plan to be around more than a couple of years from now - take this into account. How do users get at their stuff tomorrow, even if you're not around? Sure, you're busy building something cool, but this is foundational. If you build it right, ensuring accessibility in the future should be easy. If it looks too hard, you're probably doing something else wrong.

If you're a user of cloud services - and once again, that pretty much means "a user" - try to take a moment to look into getting your data back. If I store my photos here, how can I download them? If I create a blog there, how can I save my posts? If my business relies on a certain service, what is my emergency spare backup plan if that service goes away or simply changes in a way that breaks it for me?

You can't rely on the Archive Team to do it for you. If you want permanence, it takes a moment of effort.

Image by Joeri Romer via Unsplash

Marketing, like IT, is infested with people who think they know what they're doing, but really really don't. In both fields, this devalues actual professionals.

I trained in IT (Comp.Sci. degree), and my lovely & talented wife is a marketing & PR professional. I noticed a while ago that our complaints were symmetrical: people tended to undervalue what we did, and indeed the entire field. There was also a tendency for people to jump in and try to do it for themselves, with consequences that were usually either hilarious or tragic, depending on how close the observer was to the results.

Now that I am receiving formal training in marketing, I am getting it from both sides. At least I am prepared!

Image by Thom Weerd via Unsplash

I love some gratuitous hyperbole. I admit to using it myself on occasion, but that doesn’t make it any less gratuitous…

Elite-level gratuitous hyperbole is to pretend to take someone else’s hyperbole at face value and use it as fuel for a new round of hyperbole.

Exhibit A comes via an MITX talk, entitled "'Blockbusters': Why The Long Tail Is Dead And Go-Big Strategies Pay Off". What makes it a perfect example is the wilful misunderstanding of the Long Tail:

Jeff Zucker focused on cutting spending and managing for maximum profitability across all of its programming. Alan Horn, on the other hand, had the opposite strategy: embrace risk and make a few huge bets a year.

The results? NBC fell from number one to the number four network and profits tanked. Warner Bros. experienced one of its most profitable decades under Horn’s leadership.

"The notion of smaller bets being safer is a myth," Elberse told the audience. "It is safer to make bigger bets because they are likely to have bigger outcomes."

The Long Tail was never about individual producers spreading their bets across many different initiatives. Rather, it was about the newfound ability for smaller single-play producers to reach a much larger market thanks to web-phase retailers who are not constrained by their high street display space.

The Long Tail is not a mass-market play about throw things against the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s about a marketplace, with each individual producer making the biggest bet they can on their own product. The macramé jeans producer mentioned in the linked article is not Levi’s trying out yet another line, it’s some indie producer, probably in Shoreditch or Portland or Berlin. The Long Tail is Amazon or Etsy or whatever their go-to-market channel is, enabling them to go from a hundred sales to a thousand - but still not causing Levi’s or even 7 For All Mankind to lose much sleep.

What Elberse has identified is only the difference between spreading yourself thin and putting all your wood behind a few arrows. As consumers, we respond to that. When a restaurant has a hundred items on its menu, we know that they are not putting the same care and attention to each of them. That has nothing to do with Long Tail, it’s just doing a good job with your product versus doing a half-hearted one.

Image by Charlie Foster via Unsplash

I like to fly in window seats. Despite all the flying I do, I still enjoy looking out the window and seeing the world go by.

One downside though is when it comes to deplaning. There is a certain class of passenger who will storm up the aisle, barging past passengers in window seats (me) trying to get out into the aisle.

Now if they were in a hurry to get to their meeting or make a connection I would understand. I've been there often enough myself. What I don't get is when after aggravating half the plane to be first out, they then stroll along the jetway, seemingly without a care in the world, while all the passengers they
blocked overtake them...

May their beds always be full of crumbs, and may a family pet make a mess in their favourite slippers - that they only discover after putting on the footwear in question.