O2 doubles call and text allowances for iPhone contracts
Macworld UK are reporting that O2 have doubled call and text allowances for iPhone contracts including existing ones. I’m on the £35 per month plan, which means that my free calls have tripled to 600 minutes. According to O2, all accounts will be upgraded by mid March at the latest. Excellent news.
The river of news is diverted
I made the difficult decision to change my RSS reader the other day from the lovely NewsFire to the newly free NetNewsWire. As it happens I actually have a licence for NNW from before it was made free but I didn’t like it enough and went back to NewsFire.
Today, I achieved the nirvana of a news reader with no unread items in it. I feel like I’ve had my house steam cleaned or something. I’m still not 100% sold on NNW, but, like NewsFire, its integration with my blog editor MarsEdit and my del.icio.us client Pukka is great and it has the killer feature of synchronising with Newsgator Online so that I can read feeds from my iPhone and keep the unread/read status consistent on my MacBook Pro and the phone.
I miss the beautiful interface and animations of NewsFire, but I fought the three-pane RSS reader for too long. I think I’ll be with NWW for a while. Maybe when David releases NewsFire 2 I’ll give it another look.
Cheating
I was reminded today of an amusing incident we had when we first started testing prospective employees back at Interesource. I wrote the test and then had a couple of my colleagues check it for usefulness and correctness. All seemed good, so we sent it to one of our recruitment consultants who promised to make sure that his candidates would not have access to any books or the internet while they answered the test.
We got the first few completed tests back pretty quickly and started marking them, only to discover what we thought were obvious signs of the candidate cheating. We asked the agent just to make sure, and he assured us that the candidates had not had access to any materials that they could have used to cheat on the test.
We didn’t buy it. Why? One of the candidates had submitted answers in a Word document that contained elaborately formatted and coloured code. Exactly the same colouring and formatting as if it had been copied from Visual Studio and then pasted into Word in fact. Either this guy had cheated, or he was used to wasting a lot of time while coding. We leaned towards the former and didn’t deal with his agent again.
After that, we decided to have candidates come in to the office to complete the test with a pen and paper. Even this wasn’t foolproof though.
One time, a candidate came in and I gave him the test paper. He finished very quickly – which was a surprise – and I started marking the test. He was doing really well and I’d basically decided that we should give him an interview. And then I noticed that he’d made a very basic mistake in one of the answers. Exactly the same mistake that I had made when I was drawing up the model answers. He’d taken the question paper with him, so I couldn’t be certain, but I was fairly sure that I’d given him a print out of the questions and model answers instead of just the questions.
I carried on marking the test and, sure enough, he’d literally copied out everything from the paper and walked away with it to cover his tracks. The best anyone did on the test without cheating was about 50% – it was quite hard and very varied. We didn’t expect anyone to get 100% or anything close to it, really. We certainly didn’t expect them to get everything except a really simple array iterator question right.
The bottom line was that although both candidates probably thought we would think they were pretty smart, they weren’t actually smart enough to cheat without getting caught. And they were therefore not smart enough for us to employ…
My first LinkedIn stalker
I seem to have attracted a LinkedIn stalker. A few couple of weeks ago I received an ‘in mail’ from a recruitment consultant about a job at a joint venture between two very big names in the tech world. I wasn’t interested and declined the mail.
This morning, I received another mail (names obscured to protect the guilty):
I saw that you have declined the Email, however I was really impressed by your resume and that’s why I would like to speak with you anyway. This is about a really interesting career opportunity with a joint venture between XXXXX and XXXXX. They offer you as well to do your Microsoft Certifications.
Please tell me your number or give me a call.
Amazing! I had to waste 10 minutes of my day telling him to go away in the politest way I could think of (I find writing polite emails takes a lot longer than writing rude ones). On reflection I don’t know why I was polite.
(Hint to recruitment consultants: learn to write sentences that make sense so that you don’t look like undereducated idiots. Hint to the people who recruit recruitment consultants: Don’t hire undereducated idiots.)
Microsoft finally gets the message on browser compatibility
When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 they broke a huge number of sites. Why? They had tried to make IE7 standards-compatible, but had failed to understand how much work developers had had to go through to make their sites work in IE6 in the first place. There was a load of ‘best practice guidance’ guff around how to make your site work in IE7, but the upshot was what I called at the time ‘the browser tax’.
Finally, finally, finally, they seem to have understood the plight of the ordinary web developer. IE8 will work as IE7 unless explicitly told to behave with maximum standards compatibility.
This is what every web developer who understood the issues wanted them to do first time around. Chris Wilson describes it as a ‘painful and unexpected lesson’. Only because they weren’t listening properly.
In essence, Microsoft made this mess and they should let people decide when they’re ready to help them clean it up. It looks like that’s now going to be allowed to happen. About freaking time.
A dream come true
Yesterday, Shane Richmond came bounding up to me and said: ‘I know you have three blogs already, but how would you like another one?’. ‘What crazy new project is he planning now, I thought. 56 books in a year not good enough for you?‘ But this was an offer I simply couldn’t refuse. The assignment? To write a blog for the Telegraph on what it’s like to be a supporter of the world’s ‘richest club’, Queens Park Rangers. The Rs. The Super Hoops. QPR.
This metric is based on the combined (assumed) wealth of the three investors who have recently acquired control of the club, Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone and Lakshmi Mittal, not on the state of the balance sheet, which is still threadbare according to some.
The name of the blog is ‘Considerably richer than you’ as suggested by Shane. I’ll be blogging about why we choose that in due course.
Anyway, for the vanishingly small number of people who read my blog and are also interested in QPR, you can check it out here.
Two greats unexpectedly meet
One of my favourite books is Robert Musil’s massive The Man Without Qualities. The other day, Shane pointed out that Eamonn Fitzgerald had written not only about that, but also about the utterly superb TV series The Wire, whose fifth series got under way in the states last week. By chance he embedded a video of one of my favourite scenes – McNulty and Bunk doing their CSI thing in the most anti-CSI way you can imagine.
These are two niche things, and two of my favourites. It’s a strange coincidence that someone should blog about these things on consecutive days. I’ve been thinking about re-reading The Man Without Qualities. Now I have to.
One small quibble: Kakania was so called in Musil’s novel because it was a disparaging way to refer to the Austo-Hungarian Dual Monarchy – a contraction of the words ‘Kaiserlich und Königlich‘ – ‘Imperial and Royal’. So the book is not ’set in a country called Kakania’, but in Austo-Hungary.
Anyway, I recommend both greats unreservedly.
Spinny blog
I just noticed that one of my ex-colleagues, ex-Interesource Creative Director Simon I’Anson has a blog. He had a number of nicknames, the best of which was ‘Spinny’ – not because of his penchant for the phrase ‘I’m spinning plates’ (which I am happy to report he is still using) but because he regularly cheated at table football with his silly spinny finger action. You’ve got to watch him like a hawk.
He too has noticed that the Telegraph/Interesource story is out
Despite the dreadful pun that is the blog title, I’m subscribed.
Telegraph, Interesource and the future
So Shane has blown the gaff on the situation with My Telegraph and Interesource. I was one of the ‘techies’ he mentions who spent the whole night moving the servers back to Telegraph Towers one Tuesday in December. I eventually got to bed at 7 am. Despite that, the community has been slagging me off, which is nice. I hope they feel suitably chastened now.
Telegraph’s network configuration is very different from the topology at Interesource, and most of our problems were with getting the network configured correctly so that all the boxes could see each other over the right ports. As Shane says, we found some stuff yesterday that was screwing with performance – hopefully things should now be much better.
Shane mentions in passing an exciting project that we’ll be working on – I can say no more except that we’ll try to be as transparent as we can. Hopefully we’ll be able to make a very big announcement next week.
The reaction to Shane’s post has been interesting and I’d heartily endorse One Man and His Blog who identifies the perils of external hosting. To that, I’d add the perils of proprietary software. I spent a long time trying to convince people at Interesource that we should open-source our platform, not just because we could potentially harness the power of the community, but also because it would protect our existing clients and make us more attractive to new ones. Global Beach certainly did not see the advantage of OSS – once the acquisition was complete there was no chance of it being open-sourced.
For the benefit of people negotiating with people to write you software and provide hosting, I strongly advise you to establish an escrow agreement whereby a copy of the latest source code and data is regularly deposited with a trusted third party in case the company goes bust. Make sure that when people write software for you that you have a licence in perpetuity to do whatever you like with the software. Make sure that all the code you need is deposited, even code that was not written for you. You need to plan for an eventuality where the company simply doesn’t exist any more. The licence to use the software is also critical. It’s no use have a copy of the code if you’re not licensed to use it. Naturally, open source software doesn’t come with these drawbacks.
Although Interesource had verbal agreements with customers (I know, because I outlined the agreement myself countless times) that they could have access to the source code at any time and could do whatever they wanted with it, except transfer the licence to another party, the contracts that Interesource produced did not actually include these terms in many cases. Therefore, it’s been very difficult for customers to get access to their code and data – and by difficult I mean expensive, in some cases prohibitively so. Simon Dixon guesses who this might have affected.
I was asked about escrow many times in pitches by prospective clients. I always answered truthfully – that we’d be willing to have an escrow agreement for both code and data. Not one customer took us up on this. So, it’s not good enough just to ask if an agency would be prepared to enter into an escrow deal – you need to make sure it actually happens from day one. If you get agencies during the first month or so, they’ll be falling over themselves to oblige – once the relationship has had a chance to develop, they will have more leverage over you and so may be less willing to do such a deal.
My iPhone – Week 1
We might as well get it out of the way early on: I adore my iPhone. Today my old number ported over (although with some weird side effects) and so I should be a one portable device man from now on.
As always with Apple it’s simple touches that make all the difference. The screen is really crisp and rendering in Safari is utterly brilliant – it’s even sharper than a MacBook Pro. The zoom in and out are just superb – you can’t keep the childlike smile off your face. The automatic orientation detection is lovely too.
There are, of course, some features that I want Apple to add. Top of the list is a to-do list app. Ideally, that would be OmniFocus when the SDK is available (any day now, hopefully). I’d like to be able to remove the idiotic Stocks widget from my home-screen. Even better, I’d like to rearrange the screen in any way I choose. For top marks, the list of widgets should sync between the phone and my MacBook Pro.
Next, I’d like an RSS reader – ideally NewsFire. Again, that should sync with my Mac. At a push I might be willing to swap to NetNewsWire if it synced properly.
Then, I’d like a mobile blogging app – ideally MarsEdit, which I’m using to write this post.
Syncing generally could be better – although it works very well when you have your iPod cable available, it should also work over .Mac so that I don’t ever need to physically connect it. That would take care of Calendars, Contacts, Mail Accounts, Bookmarks and Widgets.
The last thing that’s missing is Copy & Paste, although that’s rumoured to be included in the next software update.
But these are little gripes. The iPhone is the best device I’ve ever bought. Everyone should have one.
