More than a month ago now I announced my departure from Humax as their Chief Technologist. I have since been working for nice company doing some productisation work and while that has been interesting I have missed my colleagues at Humax. Recently I was called by my former Director, we had some discussions and after some careful negotiations I am returning to Humax. I am now to be a member of the development team and as part of this I will now be working more in Korea than before. It is a nice step-up for me and I hope I can input some valuable effort to the Humax development process. My departure from Humax was part of my personal development and I think it also gave a number of parties opportunities to consider approaches. This year is, so far, not only a good one for me but also I think this will be an important year for the companies I work with. The development of the YouView set-top boxes in partnership with the TV industry will be a minor revolution for the market place and Humax is well placed to take advantage of that through foresight and determination to lead the UK TV market. Furthermore I am also looking forward to working with freesat to bring their ambitions to fruition and I think that working together with them Humax can help their platform really evolve.

Here’s to the next step!

My brother saw a link I posted about Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story from Channel4 and was inspired to Blog about it:

http://blog.hannent.eu/2010/11/holidays-paid-for-by-me.html

I was so concerned when I saw the original video and now I am absolutely flabbergasted that this MP believes we should be using our money (the taxes we pay) to fund holidays for those on benefits. If the old adage is that “a change is as good as a rest”, then these people don’t need a change because they already have a rest. I am sorry if this seems mean, but while my brother hasn’t had a real holiday in nine years and we (my partner and I) have to work long hours for our breaks.

I feel that we cannot continue in the way we have for the past three or more decades, and none of the governing parties are offering anything more than just squeezing everything we have (and didn’t really ask for). And while we are at it, just because the children ask for something doesn’t mean you should give it to them, so if we did ask for the extent of government involvement we shouldn’t have been given it because at the end of the day ‘the people’ are children! The government doesn’t need to tighten budgets it needs to do what any company in serious trouble would do, reduce its scope. If you aren’t successful as a company (we do call it UKPLC!) then you don’t just slim down the budgets, you should downsize!

So, where is the proposal from a serious politician to deal with the national debt and not just the budget deficit?! Where is the proposal to deal with the £4,800,000,000,000 of debt? (count those zeros!) The £77,000 that is on the head of ever man, woman and child in the UK!? I want to see some serious action, no matter what the political difficulty. I was really ashamed of the way the government dealt with Lord Young recently:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11798366

This is a man who has seen so much and has so much experience, if he says we’ve ‘never had it so good’ then I am inclined to agree. With all the social services, and this massive government debt how could the nation have anything but an easy life. Especially as the minority of the population are actually paying for the majorities lifestyles (watch the Channel4 documentary if you don’t know). The government couldn’t publicly support Lord Young because the media wouldn’t let them, the media wants to pounce on any deviation from the previous message of austerity and drama. Quoting Gary O’Donghue, Political Correspondent for the BBC:

“…his unguarded comments threatened to undermine months of carefully-honed strategy aimed at persuading the public that ministers felt your pain and that we were all in this together.”

So, driven by the journalists, the innocent man was hung out to dry because the government couldn’t admit to the public he was right. The news hounds shape the politics and the politicians are too fearful for their jobs to do what needs doing.

How can we resolve the situation? What can be done to solve the trillion pound horror story and give it an outcome that allows us to sleep well at night!?

There is a theme running through the questions that I have been asked lately about some aspects of technology and that is the questions as to if a new technology will “dominate”. Now, I’m not talking new tech of the class like “the mobile phone”, but I am talking about some new gizmo, new software structure, or new web-based service. In this article I want to comment on this phenomena and what I think of it:
Continue reading “Giant Killers in Technology”

I love tigers, they are my favourite animal in the world and it is my greatest ambition to see one in the wild. I would also love to meet a tiger in person but I realise that this cannot be practical because this isn’t the way that tigers behave in the real world. I don’t like seeing Tigers in captivity but I understand it is good to look after them in the west for their preservation but I am unsure about socialising them. My greatest challenge however is that even though I love them I worry about preservation tourisms impact on wildlife.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/blog/2010/apr/29/india-bans-tiger-tourism

Despite not being Greek myself I have very personal connections and commitments there and I was recently asked what I would do to ease the situation further (because Germany is not happy with the proposals so far). Of course I have no real influence on Greek politics but were I to be able to dictate here are my views. Warning, this is the brutal truth as I see it, it doesn’t mean I don’t like Greece but this is what I see as stopping Greece from being great again.

Personally I feel that the Greek people have let themselves get into trouble because of the way they conduct their politics. I am told that in the main the politicians are corrupt on a grand scale but as long as they do nothing that overtly and obviously affects the daily lives of the population the people won’t do anything. The people of Greece value individual liberties even if that is at the sacrifice of the common good and for all their protestations as to having been the originators of democracy they have forgotten that the cost of democracy is collective responsibility.

The unions and the people will strike because they are getting affected by the obviously unpopular cutbacks. The most notable issue is the fact that the public sector is massively bloated with probably 20-30% of people who are completely superfluous. In addition they spend huge amounts on academic research but believe that co-operating with business to commercialise efforts would taint academia. It seems that half the café workers in Greece seem to have a post-graduate degree and most of the workers seem to be regularly practising some form of tax evasion.

I love Greece but it just needs to wake up to a little self-sacrifice and the people need to take some responsibility (not just the politicians). My interim measures would be:

  • Tell every government department to cut at least 1 in 4 jobs over the next two to four years. At the same time offer amnesty to non-permanent staff and let departments decide who they actually need (many good staff are on short-term contracts many lazy people have permanent contracts).
  • Cap redundancy payments to limit the expense and begin a separate “back to work” scheme for those who are made redundant by the cuts.
  • Don’t pay those who go on strike and let them face the responsibility of not going to work (hold firm).
  • Ask politicians (local and national) to take half-pay for the next year and/or audit all expenses for the past two years.
  • Force all academic institutions to fund part of their budget each year from external (non-academic) activities or cut their budgets proportionally. Starting at 5% and adding 5% each year until 20-25%.
  • Modernise the power generation system to avoid dependency on ancient dirty/inefficient power stations.
  • Reduce bureaucracy and paperwork by 30%.
  • Cancel all non-maintenance spending on national defence (Reduce defence spending to <=3% GDP?). (Turkey isn’t really going to invade any more and they don’t need new submarines).

Just my observations over the past five years of being involved with Greece. Perhaps I am too harsh, but it is tough love. Greece lords itself for being one of the greatest countries in the history of the world, but that is history. The Greeks must look forward with a unified vision to what they want to be and have the ambition to execute that without sacrificing the things that already make Greece great (family, social life, community spirit).

Just my two Euro-cents.

We haven’t been out to the theatre for a while and we really wanted to get something in before year end. The cinema was really the easiest choice so we decided to catch a film which has been making a fair bit of noise lately: “Avatar” by James Cameron staring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver.

Continue reading “Avatar 3D: My Opinion and Review”

Matthew Bloch is one of the key team behind Bytemark and he has posted about what he sees as a lack of progress in the development of email as a technology.

On his twitter feed he asked what people thought, I posted a response but it seems to have been moderated out, so I will copy it here:

I am one of those who wanted customisation of their mail handling, my family has followed me and is using my host because the majority of mail hosting companies couldn’t account for connection oddities. I use MailWatch to track MailScanner filtering quickly and tweaking the filtering has been very important. I have one domain of mine hosted with Google Apps just because I can and it is good but perhaps it lacks the granularity for heavy business use?

If a mail hosting company was able to provide the same granularity of control as MailScanner + Postfix + PostfixAdmin + Mailwatch + MySQL + Dovecot1.2 then I think it would give businesses a case to drop their internally hosted servers. Adding RequestTracker into that mix would just be the final leap to give them a feature not available with most off-the-shelf systems.

On the mail client side what I have come to realise is that I can’t navigate my email quickly enough. I have many GB of email and at work I have thousands of emails waiting to be sorted into the myriad of sub-folders. I think the answer is tagging and bayes suggestions but I think tagging hasn’t truly been leveraged to it’s maximum. I think it should be possible to browse tags with depth to narrow down the emails. Thus the initial view should have every mail, there should be a tree list of every tag; then each tag should have every tag which is shared with the previous tag. Thus a matrix hierarchy of tags can evolve and with Bayes suggestions mails can be tagged as they arrive (I already use the Bayes sort add-in for Thunderbird). In this way the mass of mail can be filtered down to the target quickly and more importantly mail can be in many places! An email might be to do with marketing but also to do with a client.

Perhaps I need to blog this….

Anyway, good posting!

I’ve been thinking about this concept for a matrix mail client for some time and I think I need to write a white paper about it so that I can see if I can drum up interest in developing it! I will see what I can do.

Yesterday, I was reading the news during lunch time as usual when I fell upon this odd story. The man of the story definitely has a complex puzzle to put together for xmas day. I wish him courage and good luck!

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20081204/tuk-bin-man-to-tackle-10-000-jigsaw-dba1618.html


 

Well, after the disaster that was the HTC Touch Diamond I had a while ago, I decided I needed to call Orange and sort out my phones. I had been fancying an iPhone but I was loathed to move to O2 for it. I had been tracking the news around Orange because they were rumored to be selling the iPhone this year. But it being the end of November and there not being a press release in sight I decided just to call them and see what I could blackmail them in to providing.

I had seen the HTC Touch HD and thought, being the most expensive phone in the residential section I thought I should try it. I spoke to the nice lady at upgrades, she said she wasn’t authorised give me that for free and I should speak to “retentions”. I was duely transfered and speaking to the crack team; I mentioned that I wanted a good upgrade or an extreme downgrad. I asked about the HTC Touch HD and said I was looking for something like an iPhone. They said I had to pay £50 for it, I don’t normally pay for phone upgrades, however they offered me a halving of my line rental. So, I am now paying £22 per month for 1200 minutes, 900 texts, unlimited internet and I got a top of the line phone.Win!

The HTC Touch HD is much better than the Diamond, it is faster (although the processor is the same), it has a better display (a large 480×800 touch display) and all in all despite it’s relative weight it feels good to the touch. I was at a PR event last night for our company where our PR agency invited a group of journalists and we were discussing such devices. I bought out my phone and the considered opinion was that it was quite nice.

I think it won’t be going back and I can be quite happy with what I have.