This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

It occurs that I've been all technical recently.

I'm the bike rider, twisted bike rider

Have you ever let someone talk you into trying a different text editor or web browser than you normally use? If you have (and most people have) then you'll be familiar with the strange sense of disorientation you get when you do this. Someone sneaks in during the night and puts some irremovable mittens on your hands, so when you try and work the next day you flail at the keyboard like that boy from Kid in the Corner on a high sugar day and get nothing done. I've been experiencing this particular blend of confusion, frustration, and the need to stop and smoke a cigarette just to get away from it all a lot over the last week. Nothing to do with text editors (gedit) or web browsers (Firefox), though. Instead, I'm doing something entirely unattached to the computer. I've got a bike. A push bike, no less. And I ride it to the railway station every morning. Those of you who know me might be a bit surprised at this. I've got all the gear, too. Helmet, bike lock, water bottle, everything. I even tuck my trousers into my socks when I'm riding so that I don't rip my suit to shreds. It looks a lot like I'm going to have to change my name by deed poll to Norman. Cyclists are morons in stupid day-glo jackets. Take a brush to your bike, indeed. I'm not a cyclist. Sadly, I'm something worse: I'm a middle-aged man worried that he's getting too fat. I'm not sure precisely when I stopped being a teenager full of piss and vinegar and started being someone who knows what the Bank of England base rate is, but it's happened. I anticipate a slow and gentle slide into a genuine appreciation of Volvo's safety record. Of gardening, and what mulch is. Soon I'll be writing letters to the newspaper complaining about the dangerous chicanes on the A491 and spending my weekends walking in the rain on a hilltop with a compass and one of those waterproof coats that folds back up into its own pocket. On the other hand, today for the first time I managed to ride all the way to the station without having to stop for a breather. Anyone pointing out that my bike has 21 gears and I'm only using the lowest seven can fuck off.

Usability in the real world

This past weekend saw a visit to a local Chinese restaurant by a group of us. All very nice, as ever. On leaving, there was the usual conversation on the pavement -- why no-one ever says, look, we're going to stand and talk for twenty minutes anyway, why don't we do it in the bar? is beyond the ken of humanity -- and then a walk back to the car park. Now, the restaurant is midway along the side wall of this multi-storey, and so there are two entrances back to get your car; one each side of the restaurant. So we spent five minutes -- I'm not kidding, five minutes -- standing outside in the supernaturally cold weather discussing which door to go through. When usability people say not to offer the user two ways of doing the same thing, because they'll spend longer deciding which to use than just doing it, this is what they're talking about.

Y Viva Italia

Once again, this year's summer holiday is Italy. Once again, it's the Veneto. this year, though, the destination is Lake Garda. If anyone's likely to be near there at the end of August, let me know. I'll be the one doing his best to eat all the pizza and gnocchi in town and repeating the word "portacenere". Unless it's portocenere. I normally let my accent handle the confusion there.

And finally...

It's my birthday. I was born a prime number of years ago (a Mersenne prime and a lucky prime, in fact). In two years I'll be as old as Jesus, which is something to look forward to. And the number of my years is also the Turkish slang term for masturbation. No, I don't know why either. Speak on, Turkish readers. Those of you who are neither Turkish nor mathematicians (or indeed either, which would exclude Paul Erdos, unless he was Hungarian) and therefore don't know what a Mersenne prime is might find the golden figure easier to work out if you first of all knew that my age is now one less than a power of two and secondly reviewed the 2005, 2004, and 2003 versions of this game. Those of you who are wholly mathematically incompetent should review the 2006 version and add one. If even that is beyond your abilities, then find the nearest person to you wearing glasses and ask them for help. I'll be busy over here putting candles on the cake.

Google searches seem to be throwing up a lot of RSS feeds these days. Quite often I'll find that the feed for a given weblog post is returned higher in the results than the weblog post itself, or worse that the feed is returned and the actual post isn't! This is as annoying as hell for me, and it'd be death for someone less technical who would just get a big screen full of XML. Google: do something about it, you know it makes sense.

Truprint, a photo processing firm in the UK, have leapt into the digital world with both feet (as have all the other photo processors) by allowing you to upload digital photos to their website for printing as actual real photos, which they'll then send back to you. We've always used Truprint, and last night we thought we'd try out this new upload-and-print-out thing, what with all our cameras now being digital. I was surprised and pleased to discover that, to upload to their site, they provide a little tool called QuickUpload. But it's not an ActiveX control; it's not a Windows-specific application. It's a Firefox extension! They do have an ActiveX one for IE users, but they're also supporting Firefox. Bloody well done Truprint. This sort of thing should be applauded. I have mailed them to tell them so. I also mailed them to mention that the extension said it'd take 10 minutes to upload our photos and it actually took two hours, but hey, all software's got bugs.

Overheard during a conversation at work today (don't know who was being talked about, but it was someone external):

He's a nice guy, but he's not really a pro-active engineer.

I think I'd rather be a nice guy.

There are a couple of low-ish traffic mailing lists that I'd like to read in my feed reader, because I really only want to pay attention to what's posted, rather than follow up. I'm aware that this sort of behaviour is poison to building a community around a mailing list, but I really need this for -announce type lists, where there's no community anyway. What this of course means is that I need a way of converting a mailing list to an RSS feed. Fortunately, someone's ahead of me on this: Tom Dyson has set up MailBucket, which makes this whole process pretty easy. Simply subscribe some-email-address@mailbucket.org to the mailing list, and then an RSS feed of that list is available at http://mailbucket.org/some-mailing-list. Nice job! You'll need to take a glance at the feed after you've done the subscription, because most lists these days require some form of confirmation. Lists being run with the Mailman software are easy to handle, because their "please confirm your subscription" message contains a URL for you to visit to confirm it, which you can do. If you want to subscribe to a list which requires you to send an email from some-email-address@mailbucket.org to confirm subscription then it might be a bit more tricky; I don't know how to do that, but maybe Tom can help you. I've just used it to subscribe to the OpenMoko announce list, so I can find out when the all-new exciting OpenMoko phone becomes available. Looks suspiciously like an Apple iPhone, except it's been in development for longer than since MacWorld so it must be independent invention. And it's a completely open platform; runs Linux and X.org. I've been thinking about getting a new phone, since my z800i is starting to die, and is a Sony phone besides. (Bought before I really decided that I shouldn't give Sony any of my cash, but that's not the point.) For those of you who think the iPhone looks cool, there's a comparison between the OpenMoko phone and the iPhone available, which makes it look to me as though the iPhone has the edge in terms of equipment (and things like multi-pointer) but the OpenMoko is going to be available sooner and is an open platform. Write your own software for it, which means that all of us unbeautiful people have the chance to make our phones better. If you're not interested in that, fine; you're welcome to not buy it. Me, I like the idea. Only £180 too, which isn't all that much. I want one. And now I'll know when it's released.

As mentioned in these pages before, the LugRadio team are going to SkyCon in Limerick, Eire on February 16th-18th 2007. They asked me to do a talk, as also mentioned, and after polling my gentle readers I've decided that the most interest is in Jackfield. So, if you're interested in Jackfield, try and get along to Limerick next month. This does also mean that I'll carve out some time to fix the D-Bus stuff and generally do some more work on the project, which should make some people happy!

Dammit, the second BarCamp London is on while I'm at Skycon. I really wanted to go this time.

OK, I believe you can now use your OpenID to comment here, if you have one. I used the Wordpress OpenID plugin by Hans to make it happen, and I have to applaud him on how easy it was to implement. I personally had to add the OpenID login box to my theme pages myself, because they're extensively customised, but I just followed the README and it explained it in perfect detail. If you're using a theme that resembles the Wordpress default then apparently it all Just Works for you, which is even nicer. Oh, and I stole the description of what an OpenID is from Simon. Nice one Simon. It's good, this OpenID stuff. I'm going to do more with it. (Update: originally I was worried that OpenID commenting here wouldn't work properly with the comment editing that I've recently built, but I've since fixed that. Comment away, with OpenID or not, and edit your comments as you please.)

In a recent review of Linux podcasts in Linux User and Developer magazine (no link because the magazine doesn't seem to be available online), the reviewer said that LugRadio was like "a Linux version of Top Gear". I can die happy now.

Jeremy Zawodny is a bit doubtful about a new chewing-gum-based anti-obesity drug. I can see his point, but I think he might be overegging the disbelief a touch. I followed up with the following: I think it might help more than you're expecting. There are, I believe, three states you can be in:

• Hungry
• Not hungry
• Full

Everyone wants to eat when they're hungry. Everyone doesn't want to eat when they're full. As you say, though, people who are overweight (like, say, me) eat when they're not hungry, when it's neutral to do so (don't necessarily need food, but don't dislike the idea). People who aren't overweight (and aren't that way through a huge mental effort), I think, don't eat when they're not hungry (as you mention). So, what you want is to take someone overweight and poke their brain so that when they're in the "not hungry" state they actually feel full and don't want to eat. The impression I got (although this might be wishful thinking) is that that's what this chewing gum stuff does, sort of. There may be some sort of conscious effort (i.e., recognising when you're in "not hungry"), but the policy there is relatively simple: whenever you're not actually eating a meal and you fancy a snack, eat the chewing gum instead of looking in the fridge. It's no panacea, but if it works like that then it might have some hope of success. (only posted here because when I try to post it on Jeremy's site I get "You don't have permission to access /mt/mt-comments.cgi on this server.")

It really massively annoys me when I post a comment to someone's site and then have to keep checking back to see if anyone's followed it up. Now, I'm aware of coComment but I don't like it much; people have to sign up for it, for a start, and that's just one more place to sign up for. (This might be helped with OpenID or something, but whatever.) So all my comment forms now have a "Post comment and follow comments in your feed reader" button as well as the normal Post Comment button. Write a comment and click that and it will post your comment and then take you to a page where you can choose your feed reader; you'll then have any further comments on that post appear in your reader when they happen. The thing that chooses your feed reader is Aquarion's SubscribeMe, so I don't have to do the heavy lifting in finding out how to throw you a feed in such a way as to make it appear in your reader. It's all done with JavaScript, not surprisingly. At the moment the script is pretty specific to my comments pages, but I plan to make it a bit more generic so that you can just pick it up and add it to your comments pages to get the same feature for your site. Make it easier for your commenters to follow along with a comment thread. (For those of you who really want it now, it's available. It requires JQuery and the JQuery form plugin at the moment, although the final version won't. To adapt it for your site, you'll need to change subsc.FEED_READER_URL to make it construct the URL for the RSS feed for comments for the post you're on, and also change inps[i].value == 'Submit Comment' so that it finds your existing submit button. If that didn't make a lot of sense to you then I advise you to wait until I release a more generic version.) Let me know if there's a problem with it. You might also want to let Aquarion know if your feed reader isn't supported, or you can tell me if you prefer.

For a while now, Niamh's wanted to be a vet. This morning, she changed her mind a few times. First, she wanted to be a teacher. Then she wanted to be a vet again. Finally, she decided on her career. "No, no," she said, "I don't want to be a vet. I want to be the government." Presumably when she initiates the military coup and becomes Arch-Generalissimo, I'll get some sort of plum post in the new dictatorship. No idea what'll happen to all of you proletarians; I should start buttering her up now if I were you. Niamh prevails.

I want to be able to read electronic books on the train. More importantly, I want everyone else to be able to do the same. "But, but, but, you can already do that! Sony's Reader does it! And Franklin's eBookman! And loads of others!" No, no they don't. They let people like me (and doubtless you, gentle reader) read books on the train. They're computers. Computers are not useful and not fun. People don't want to read books on a screen, they don't want to read one on a computer, they don't want to think about computers when they're reading. I mean, look at the Sony Reader. That doesn't look like a book. That's a PDA. Someone looking at that isn't going to think, "I am reading a book". They'll think "I am reading a book on a computer", and then they'll hate it. What they want, I believe (based on asking quite a few people about it, and discussing it with a friend in the publishing industry) is what I'm about to describe.

What the thing looks like

Imagine something that looks like a book. It's about the same weight as a book, it's about the same thickness as a (thinnish) book. And there's text on it that is the same as a book; you can read it in bad lighting conditions, it's not lit up, it's well formatted. This is already possible with E-Ink's technology; it's what the Sony Reader uses, for example. An E-Ink "screen" looks like words printed on paper, doesn't need a backlight, and lasts for ages on one battery. It's like a printed piece of paper, in fact. The difficult technology bit of this is done. What's missing is how people actually read books. The device I propose would allow you to read books. Any book you can get onto it. It folds in half, so when it's folded it's about half the size of a book (and will go into your pocket or handbag or briefcase); when it's folded it's not running, and when you unfold it it's instantly working again. (This is the advantage with the E-Ink stuff; it doesn't use any power to maintain the screen.) To turn the page, you press on the bottom right corner (or bottom left corner to turn back a page). The "screen" is the whole width of it; there's no plastic border around the screen at all (so it doesn't look like a PDA).

How to use it

The way you get books onto it is that there's basically a mobile phone built into it. You press a "stop reading this book" button and it shows you a list of all the books, ever. Choose a book to read and enter your credit card number (somehow: I've got some UI ideas for this), and it gets the book for you and you can read it. The way you get books off it onto some other device is: you can't. There are no ports on it. None. The only thing you can plug into it is its power supply, and that only needs plugging in about once a fortnight (because it's very low-power, as mentioned). It has nothing to do with your computer. You never plug it into your computer, or bring it near your computer. This neatly avoids the whole DRM-for-books thing, because it is not possible to take the book off your reader and put it on the internet. The device can't browse around the internet; it can't play Tetris; you can't balance your checkbook on it. It reads books, and that's all it does. It doesn't ask you where to connect to, because it only ever connects to one place.

Who buys it

The market for it is all the people who read books on the train. They get the same experience from this that they do at the moment, but it can be all the books you've ever wanted, and you never have to go near Waterstones or any other bookshop. You don't have to worry about where to find a book; they're all available. You could even let people read the first chapter for free or something. It costs less than a hundred pounds.

Possible problems

You may be thinking: there are some problems with this. I sort of agree with you. One of them is: how do you get every book in the world onto it? Well, I'm prepared to say that it's limited to those books that can already be bought in electronic form, somehow. I'm not 100% clear on the legality of my proposal here, but here it is: when someone says "get me, say, Thud, the latest Discworld book", the server charges them $7.99, then connects to (say) http://ebooks.palm.com/product/detail/20229?book=Thud_, downloads the ebook from there (paying the $7.99 that the punter paid), and sends the ebook down to the device. We don't touch the ebook; you're just buying it and then reselling it without ever reading it. That's certainly allowed in the US (under the first sale doctrine) and it's likely to be fine everywhere else, because every time someone with my reader buys Thud we go and buy another copy of the ebook. We don't buy one copy and sell it more than once. After you've been doing that for a while, when lots of people have the device, then you approach the publishers direct and say "why not make your books available to this market, who will buy them, and it avoids all the existing problems with ebooks". You don't approach them beforehand because they'll say no, or worse they'll say yes if and only if you agree to sell only their books. That's a dreadful idea; people who read don't care who publishes the book. A second problem is: how do you put a mobile phone in it without charging a monthly subscription? Well, you build 2 years worth of mobile phone subscription into the original purchase price, and then you eat the cost after that, basically. The subscription should be pretty cheap anyway, because it's incredibly low bandwidth; pagers are subscriptionless too in (I suspect) the same way. The device only has to download 300K or so of book once every few weeks. Make it GSM rather than GPRS, make it as cheap and intermittent as you want, really.

So make it happen

I think this is doable, based on how all the technology exists. I think it'd be a roaring success in the market, based on talking to lots of people about why they're not interested in reading on a PDA. I also think that I have neither the capital nor the time to do it myself, as is usual with these things. So, go for it. Make a million. If you do make it, bung me one for free. And one for Tim, the chap who helped me cook up this idea over a few very late nights and early mornings.