“Woloch hits his stride with a compelling analysis of the four pages or so in The Road to Wigan Pier devoted to a description of the long, gruelling ‘commute’ the miners undertake to and from the coalface. The significance of this, Orwell notes, is something ‘one is always liable to miss’, for the precise reason that it has already been missed: nobody gets paid to commute, even though the time it takes is company time. »
This blog does seem to be a bit of a ‘look! I have a new job!’ notifier these days. So, look! I have a new job! I’m just about to start working as a Product Manager at Endless, working on making devices and software that empowers the other 75% of people in the world. It’s going to be fun. »
A text message has flooded in: >Your Data Test Drive ends on 18/01/2016. You currently have 6.0GB included in your bundle and on average you have used 14.6GB a month. To avoid extra data charges and unexpected costs add 2GB UK data for £10 a month. Text 2GB to 97888 for free. To keep an eye on your data usage download the free My Vodafone app at http://vdfn.co/eq9a8 Helpful advice. »
A thing I used to do was write blog posts full of links I’d found interesting in the past week or so. Twitter and Pinboard mostly ate that content, but for old times sake I thought I’d go back through some things I’d saved and see if there was anything useful. How to know if where you live is “up and coming” JPEGtran, a command whose man page is essentially a handy cheat sheet of the operations it’s possible to perform losslessly on a JPEG file. »
I’m excited to say that I’m going to be joining Klarismo as a Product Manager. It’s a great opportunity to be able to join a company that has already been made fun of in a BuzzFeed listicle. Whilst I’m sad to be leaving Collabora after a year of making the world safe for open source software, this was an opportunity I couldn’t refuse. If you’d like to join me, then we’re hiring! »
If you read Augmenting a user interface with information and Augmenting a user interface with additional information you’ll see that several of the concepts I worked on at Intel have been patented. I have mixed emotions. I am strongly and publicly against the concept of software patents. I don’t believe they’re useful for the advancement of the software industry; nor do they really give enough information to actually move forward the state of the art. »
The not-super-great-open-source code hosting system Gitorious has been acquired and shut down by the much-better-and-open-source code hosting system GitLab. This is an overall net win for humanity but does have a few downsides. A few years ago Intel and Nokia selected Gitorious to host the source code for their MeeGo Operating System. With the upcoming shutdown, that code was about to go offline. Since I have a sentimental attachment to MeeGo I’ve copied the repos for the MeeGo Netbook UX (source code) and MeeGo Tablet UX (source code) to GitHub. »
This talk from Google IO 2014 is about a redesign, that of Google Maps - but to me it feels like the process behind a really good design for any sort of complex dynamic system. Lovely to see the working being shown and some really interesting examples of the ‘double the hypothesis to get a reaction to see if you’re moving in the correct direction’ technique as well as the wide variety of locations tested and visualised. »
Nine years ago I drew some diagrams attempting to reverse engineer the coffee, milk and foam proportions available in the beverages served at Eat. I’m not going to pretend that this was particularly original work but when walking past one of their branches the other day I noticed some uncannily familiar design. Actually pretty decent communication, well done. Avoid the actual drinks there though. »
A few years ago I worked with a number of my former colleagues to create Pinpoint, a quick hack that made it easier for us to give presentations that didn’t suck. Now that I’m at Collabora I have a couple of presentations to make and using pinpoint was a natural choice. I’ve been updating our internal templates to use our shiny new brand and wanted to use some newer features that weren’t available in Fedora’s version of pinpoint. »