Posted on the 23rd of May at about 7PM.

Rules that bar analysts from publishing during an IPO but let them talk are surely asking for trouble

Put yourself in the position of a US fund manager thinking of investing in Facebook at IPO stage. You think the stock is wildly overpriced but you know you've got to own a few of the damned things because the company will be a $100bn monster. You don't want to end up chasing the shares if there's a big "pop" in the first week of trading. So how many shares should you order?

Then, miracle of miracles, you get word that Scott Devitt, analyst at Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter, has cut his short-term earnings forecasts for Facebook.

Well, you knew the company's prospectus update, on 9 May, was downbeat about selling ads on mobiles, but you didn't appreciate it was such a forecast shifter. You also know news of the reduced forecast will not be revealed to the world because the rules say it cannot be.

Your mind is made up: it's safe to be underweight; Facebook ain't going to fly on day one.

Does this illustrative tale explain last week's IPO flop? We await the verdict of various US regulators, but it may be extremely hard to prove that Morgan Stanley did anything wrong.

The IPO was an over-priced shambles, of course, but that is not the same thing as a conspiracy to fleece the public. If the rules say analysts at underwriting banks cannot publish research during an IPO period, but can talk to clients, then it is hard to see what Morgan Stanley should have done differently. The bank could have cut the price of Facebook shares, of course, but it seems to be claiming that it did at least contemplate that course.

"These revised views [of analysts at several underwriting banks who cut forecasts] were taken into account in the pricing of the IPO," says Morgan Stanley's statement.

We'll judge the credibility of that statement when more details emerge.

But, on the face of it, part of Joe Punter's anger should be directed at regulators for sanctioning a system that seems loaded against the little guy. Analysts on the inside should either be gagged completely or not at all. Imposing half a gag – a ban on published research but no limit on conversations with privileged clients – is asking for  trouble.

Posted on the 23rd of May at about 7PM.

Social network's shares continue to fall, but executives in California's technology hub say tech boom will continue

Recriminations over Facebook's stock offering may be rattling Wall Street, but Silicon Valley considers the flotation a ruthless and successful smash-and-grab raid.

Entrepreneurs and executives in California's technology hub shrugged off controversy over Facebook's IPO and said the region's tech boom was solid and would continue.

But this is isn't a view shared outside the Valley, where experts warned that the debacle is likely to close the window for other tech firms considering share sales.

It is too early yet to judge whether Facebook will be a stock market success, but it has got off to an inauspicious start. The social media giant's shares tumbled 8.9% on Tuesday, scrubbing $8.3bn in market value. Since its initial price of $38 last Friday, shares have fallen to $31, reducing the company's value from $104bn to $85bn.

Financial regulators are investigating whether banks in charge of the IPO broke rules on the floatation's eve by selectively releasing negative news about Facebook to big investors but not the general public.

Other companies in Silicon Valley said if Mark Zuckerberg and his executives were guilty of anything it was shrewdly calculated greed, not overreach, and that the rest of the tech industry did not feel chastened.

Vasudev Bhandarkar, a CEO and board member of several companies,
including GlobalLogic, a research and development outfit, said
Facebook did not want to leave any money on the table. "It's not
hubris, it's ruthlessness. They did the best for themselves and ended
up screwing investors. Mark Zuckerberg has been very single-minded
about the valuation of his company."

Steve Blank, a start-up entrepreneur who teaches at Stanford University, said: "They twisted the arms of their bankers and sucked dry the maximum
amount of money they could. They went home laughing. Should they have done that? Probably not. But if they can deliver profits all will be forgiven."

Blank expected five to 10 more Silicon Valley companies to seek listings within the next 12 months.

In New York, Sam Hamadeh, founder of the analyst PricVo, disagrees. "That sound you can hear now is the soiund of the IPO window shutting," he said. Facebook was supposed to be the IPO that ushered in a new wave of tech share sales, he said. Instead, shareholders had been left with the impression that early investors had made a killing at the expense of anyone foolish enough to buy in at inflated prices.

Hamadeh said there were many good tech companies now preparing for IPOs – including Spotify and Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds – that would now face far tougher conditions thanks to Facebook's problems. Those firms and many others had been banking on a successful IPO from Facebook to boost their own share sales.

"They had all been expecting a halo effect from Facabook's IPO," said Hamadeh. "That's gone."

Chicago securities attorney Andrew Stoltmann said in the short-term tech IPOs were in a lot of trouble. "I wouldn't want to be a tech firm looking at an IPO right now. This is so high profile that any investor is bound to be looking twice at other tech sales," he said.

Litigation and regulator inquiries are likely to keep the IPO in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, said Stoltmann, making it still harder for other companies looking to go public.

The IPO row had created a headache for Facebook's public relations department but the company's core managerial team probably had no regrets, said Bhandarkar. He predicted Facebook's shares would fall to between $20 and $25 within six months but that it would shake off the controversy and continue to thrive. "It's a very, very strong company. I'm very bullish about it."

Despite widespread accusations that Nasdaq bungled the floatation, causing multiple delays and frustrations on the first day, Bhandarkar said Silicon Valley would continue to use the stock market.

"It has not done an unjust job over the past 15 years. They've done reasonably well." GlobalLogic, he said, "would most likely consider Nasdaq" for its own IPO.

Most in Silicon Valley believe that Facebook will weather the bad headlines. Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old co-founder of Box, a cloud computing firm a few miles from Facebook at Palo Alto, said in an email interview that Facebook's size and profile made its stock market debut a special case. Other software firms had had successful IPOs in the past year, he said.

"We've seen very strong public offerings from Splunk, Jive, ExactTarget, LinkedIn and others; Workday's expected IPO will also certainly be one to watch." The best gauge of Facebook's long term viability, he said, would be whether it could continue its pace of innovation. "All past execution points to it doing very well in the future."

He may well be right, but the impact on Facebook's younger peers may take longer to shake off.

Posted on the 23rd of May at about 6PM.

Activists who set themselves up as 'official Olympics protesters' are suspended after complaint from London 2012 organisers

Twitter has cracked down over online infringement of the Olympic logo after the Games' organisers, Locog, complained that an activist group had used the trademark 2012 image to parody the London sporting festival.

A week after Space Hijackers set themselves up as the "official protesters of the London 2012 Olympic Games", Twitter suspended the account without warning, saying the satirists' use of the logo as a Twitter picture was an abuse of its rules as it meant they could be "confused" with an actual Olympic sponsor.

In correspondence with the group, Twitter is understood to have written: "We have received reports from the trademark holder, London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Ltd [Locog], that your account, @spacehijackers, is using a trademark in a way that could be confusing or misleading with regard to a brand affiliation. Your account has been temporarily suspended due to violation of our trademark policy."

The group says that after it wrote to Twitter, the account was unlocked late on Wednesday afternoon and it had been given 48 hours to comply with Twitter's orders or face having the account, with its 2,700 followers, permanently suspended.

A spokesman for the group who used the name "Bristly Pioneer" said he was surprised at Twitter's decision. "Our latest project is to do with the Olympics and obviously they have got an official chocolate bar and an official TV and the rest of it and we thought what they were missing was an official set of protesters," he said.

"We were kind of surprised that Twitter, after having after having supported everyone through the Arab spring … shut down our account without even asking any questions … they locked us straight out of the count, no questions."

The group, who once tried to sell a tank at a UK arms fair, said it was clearly not trying to sell "fake tickets to the Games" and that what it was engaged with was "purely social commentary".

"These trademark laws are set up so that Pepsi don't infringe on Coca Cola's branding. It is not set up so Locog can stamp down on a school fete because they've got some Olympic rings on their iced buns."

The spokesman added that the group had had "instant support" including from the comedian Mark Thomas, who changed his Twitter avatar to that of Space Hijackers' redesigned Olympic logo in anarchist black and red.

Pioneer also described the logo as a "social meme" that had become part of the London landscape. However, despite its ubiquitous presence, he said, it could not be used by ordinary people. "It's like Voldemort – you're not allowed to mention it otherwise you'll invoke the wrath of Locog."

Locog said it had complained to Twitter using normal channels open to any member of the public.

A spokesperson added that Locog was not taking issue with Space Hijackers' politics: "This is purely about our logo."

Posted on the 23rd of May at about 6PM.

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Posted on the 23rd of May at about 6PM.

Schmidt warns about rise of censorship and government cybercrime in speech at London's Science Museum

Nations that carry out cybercrimes and wreak online havoc pose the greatest threat to the future of the internet, the chairman of Google has warned.

In a speech delivered at London's Science Museum on Wednesday, Eric Schmidt said the internet would be vulnerable for at least 10 years, and that every node of the public web needed upgrading to protect against crime. Fixing the problem was a "huge task" as the internet was built "without criminals in mind" he said.

"While threats come from individuals and even groups of people, the biggest problem will be activities stemming from nations that seek to do harm. It is very difficult to identify the source of cyber-criminality and stop it," he said.

The Google chairman raised a series of fears in a speech that announced a new initiative to send teachers into UK schools to teach computer science, and called for more people to enter science and engineering to drive industry.

Speaking at the museum, Schmidt said he worried about the permanence of information on the internet and its impact on individuals in future. "The fact that there is no delete button on the internet forces public policy choices we had never imagined," he said. "A false accusation in your youth used to fade away; now it can remain forever."

Schmidt also used his speech to warn about the rise in governments that censor online material, up from four a decade ago to at least 40 today. Through filtering, governments could build their own "Balkanised web", where people saw different information online depending on who and where they were, without anyone knowing what had been censored.

"Make no mistake, this is a fight for the future of the web, and there is no room for complacency," he said.

Last year in the annual MacTaggart lecture, Schmidt was highly critical of Britain's failure to teach computer programming in schools. Continuing the theme at the Science Museum, he blamed a lack of exposure to computer science in secondary schools, where only 4,000 students studied the subject in 2011, making up less than half a percent of that year's A-level results.

A January report from the Royal Society agreed there was a shortage of teachers equipped to teach the nuts and bolts of computer science, from computer architecture to the concept of an algorithm and writing software. Since then, the education secretary, Michael Gove, has scrapped the existing ICT curriculum, freeing schools to teach a broader mix of computer science and programming.

Schmidt conceded that "rebooting computer science education" would not be straightforward, and announced plans to fund a training scheme for teachers to help improve Britain's failing computer science education system.

Working with the charity Teach First, Schmidt said the first batch of 100 "first-rate" teachers would be trained this summer and have bursaries to buy teaching aids, such as cheap Raspberry Pi or Arduino computer starter kits. They will receive on-the-job mentoring and training for a further two years. The Google project aims to help around 20,000 pupils from the most disadvantaged communities.

A vocal champion of engineering, in his speech on Wednesday Schmidt also emphasised the need to dispel the "oily rag stereotype" view of engineers. Research by Intel in the US, he said, found that two thirds of teenagers never considered a career in engineering. But simply learning about their roles in making video games and social networking, and in high-profile incidents such as the rescue of the Chilean miners, made half reconsider.

"Put simply, technology breakthroughs can't happen without the scientists and engineers to make them. The challenge society faces is to equip enough people, with the right skills and mindset, and to get them to work on the most important problems.

"This is where education comes in. Great scientists are a rare breed, so the more who study science, the greater chance of finding those for whom it becomes a vocation. Although there are some signs of progress, so long as more kids aspire to win X Factor than win a Nobel Prize, there's room to improve," Schmidt said.

Last year, Google donated more than £1m to the Science Museum to fund a gallery on the history of communications, from telegraphs to tweets. Part of the money has funded an exhibition devoted to the life and legacy of Alan Turing, often described as the "father of the computer", which opens next month. Among the exhibits will be installations that anyone in the world can control over the internet, including one that allows people to make music through remote controlled robotic instruments.

Posted on the 23rd of May at about 5PM.

Father of the Flash-Matic, the first wireless TV remote control

On his death at the age of 96, the US inventor Eugene Polley has received the accolade he wanted most: to be recognised as the father of the TV remote control. As he told the Baltimore Sun in November 2000: "It makes me think maybe my life wasn't wasted. Maybe I did something for humanity – like the guy who invented the flush toilet."

Polley's problem was that his invention, the raygun-like Flash-Matic remote control, was quickly superseded by a more popular device, the Space Command, which was developed by Robert Adler, his colleague at what was then Zenith Radio Corp. This led to Adler becoming known as the father of the remote control, though as Polley observed: "A father has to be present at conception. And if you're not, you're not the father."

Adler had, in fact, developed the first TV remote control, Lazy Bones, which Zenith introduced in 1950. This was a controller on the end of a long wire, which meant people could trip over it. Zenith's president, Eugene F McDonald, wanted a wireless version, and Polley came up with the Flash-Matic. This was, essentially, a hi-tech torch. Users pointed it at four photocells positioned next to the corners of the TV screen to trigger actions. They could turn the TV on and off, move to the next or previous channel, and mute the sound.

The Flash-Matic was launched in 1955 and was a great success. However, users could forget which corner performed which action, and their TV could respond erratically to, for example, sunlight through a window. As a result, in 1956 Zenith switched to Adler's Space Command, which used small metal rods to generate high-frequency sound waves to control the set. Known as "the clicker", it was used until the early 1980s, when infra-red controls took over. Today's controllers are much closer to Polley's idea than to Adler's.

Adler and Polley were contrasting characters. Adler was a European scientist with a doctorate from the University of Vienna. Polley, a native of Chicago, was a self-taught inventor who worked his way up from a menial job in Zenith's stockroom in 1935. Polley had studied at the City Colleges of Chicago and the Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology). However, he dropped out to take a job because his mother, Vera Wachowski, was struggling during the depression. Polley's father, described as a bootlegger, deserted the family when Polley was about 10.

Polley's natural aptitudes took him a long way at Zenith. He occupied positions including product engineer, mechanical engineer, head of video recording group and assistant division chief. During the second world war, he worked on bomb fuses and radar while on secondment to the defence department. Later he contributed to the development of push-button radios for cars. In all he earned 18 US patents, while Adler gained 180. Both men retired in 1982, when Polley had worked for Zenith for 47 years. Polley, by then a widower, lived with his daughter, Joan, in a cluttered house in Lombard, near Chicago. He always kept an original Flash-Matic to hand.

In his later years, Polley felt he did not get enough credit for his invention. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 2006, he said: "Not only did I not get credit for doing anything, I got a kick in the rear end." In fact, he had been awarded a $1,000 bonus. When the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave Zenith an Emmy for developing the TV remote control, both Polley and Adler collected it.

Polley's wife, Blanche, to whom he was married for 34 years, died in 1976. Their daughter, Joan, died in 2008. He is survived by his son, Eugene, and a grandson, Aaron.

• Eugene Polley, inventor, born 29 November 1915; died 20 May 2012

Posted on the 23rd of May at about 4PM.

Evidence from Andrew Marr that blogs are 'as influential as any newspaper' prompts debate on whether they are journalists

Lord Justice Leveson has queried whether bloggers would have to be brought in a revised system of press regulation, as he heard evidence from Andrew Marr about the growing power of political websites.

The BBC journalist and politics show presenter said that ConservativeHome and other sites are "now as influential as any newspaper" and any new system of regulation proposed by the judge "would have to include those alongside newspapers".

Marr said that political bloggers were often "card-carrying party members" often with "strong contacts with their side", which meant that they could not be treated as "old-fashioned journalists" but were nevertheless increasingly significant.

The observation prompted Leveson to reflect that he saw an "enormous spectrum" of online material ranging from a simple text to bloggers who are "a trade or a business" as he touched on the boundaries of regulation.

He went on to ask rhetorically whether regulation might distinguish between those who are "simply commenting" and sites "getting towards the business end of journalism" – a clear signal that he was continuing to give thought to the issue.

Earlier, Leveson asked Marr – also a former editor of the Independent – to reflect on the differences between press and broadcast regulation.

Marr said that the BBC code of conduct for journalists was "stringent and so carefully monitored" for somebody coming from a newspaper background. He added that when he joined the BBC, the level of monitoring was unexpected "because really every phrase that you use… exactly how long you talk to people for, all of that is being watched".

But Marr said that he did not believe that newspapers would necessarily prosper under heavier regulation. He said: "Newspapers are in a very, very parlous state in this country… most of them are hollowed out, they are very short of money … and none of them yet has found plausible answer to the challenges revenue brought by the internet.

"A new system of regulation placed on top of that, you know might be like taking away the feeding tube right at the end or the oxygen mask. So those would be my worries."

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

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Posted on the 23rd of May at about 4PM.

But what kind of business does that mean for app developers targeting this market?

A lot of parents are handing their smartphones and tablets to their children to use apps, and a lot of developers and brands are making apps to target them. But how many of those apps are actually being paid for?

A survey conducted by US market research firm NPD Group suggests not many. In fact, it claims that "there are an average of 12 apps on mobile devices that kids have access to, with 88% of those apps being acquired for free".

NPD goes on to note that games are "by far" the most popular app genre used by children, and warns that kids aren't the most loyal app users. "While there are a number of engaging and entertaining apps available to kids, many are used and abandoned after a short time," says analyst Anita Frazier.

I'm puzzled about the 12 apps per average device figure, given that separate research from Nielsen earlier in the month suggested that in the US, at least, the average smartphone now has 41 apps installed.

Even so, the key points here – which are slightly worrying for developers making apps for children – are the seemingly large appetite for a constant succession of free apps.

That's no different to the wider apps market, of course. Yet while developers in other areas see in-app purchases (and to a lesser extent, advertising) as their way to make money from this appetite for freebies, both of these models are problematic when it comes to children's apps.

Apple has already been sued in the US over the existence of "bait apps", following several controversies in 2011 when children blew their parents' credit cards on in-app purchases within freemium games.

And advertising? That's another can of worms when it comes to children's apps, in terms of policing what ads are shown, and keeping to legislation around the world on marketing to children. It's no surprise that a number of prominent kid-app developers make a virtue in their app store listings of not using IAP or ads.

Which brings us back to the question of how many companies are making good money from apps for children, in order to build a sustainable business for the future.

And if the answer is "not many", is there a risk that over time, the kid-apps market will become more about big brands using free apps to market, say, physical toys or TV shows, and less about developers and startups making original, creative paid apps for children?

Which is not to say that the big-brand apps are a bad thing, all of the time. But writing as a parent, as much as a journalist, I hope the original stuff doesn't get squeezed out in the months and years ahead.

Posted on the 23rd of May at about 3PM.

Search giant's executive chairman rejects suggestions it will have to change how it presents search results in Europe

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday is set for a showdown with the European Commission's antitrust commissioner when he rejected suggestions the search giant will have to change how it presents search results in Europe.

Speaking at Google's Big Tent event in Hertfordshire, Schmidt said "we disagree that we are in violation" of European monopoly rules and said Joaquín Almunia, the antitrust commissioner, had not outlined the EC's objections.

Almunia wrote to Schmidt on Monday saying the EC has identified "four concerns where Google business practices may be considered as abused of dominance". In Europe Google has about 90% of the search market.

The two sides have scheduled a meeting for the coming weeks, he said.

Schmidt said "the letter is all we've heard from them" – although the EC's investigation opened in November 2010. "We haven't heard the details. I'm not going to speculate on the details."

Almunia's letter said the EC is concerned about Google's promotion of its own products over rivals' in searches for items such as shopping, over its copying and re-display of content from restaurant sites, over its restrictions on competitors' ads appearing alongside its own, and the portability of advertising campaigns from Google's Adwords system.

The EC has the power to exact fines of up to 10% of a company's global revenues if it determines that a company has abused a dominant position. For Google, that could amount to $4bn (£2.6bn). Microsoft and Intel have fallen foul of its antitrust group, suffering swingeing fines. Almunia has indicated that he would wish to settle with Google without seeking legal recourse in order to have a speedy remedy – but if not, that a full "statement of objections" could follow.

"He is encouraging us to have a conversation," said Schmidt. "We completely agree [to that]. We disagree that we are in violation. Until they are precise about what areas of the law we have violated, it will be very difficult for me to speculate."

Posted on the 23rd of May at about 3PM.

Google's second Big Tent event is in its second year - and this year has panels on pornography, copyright and more

4.33pm: Harkaway: Most dangerous time for a revolution is after the tumult, that's why Occupy is different because it's just reflection of how people feel rather than a political aim. Else we go back to the 20th century revolutionary politics where you have riots and then you have a new set of guys who do just the same at the top of the tree.

And that's the end - and the end of today's live blog. Thanks for staying with us today, hope it was useful (if it wasn't blocked by your work. Well, we couldn't help Amanda Platell going into remarkable detail about what she found on a porn site.)

4.28pm: Q (from BigBrotherWatch): Why do you think people hand over data to companies that governments couldn't get without protest?

Q (from Hansard Society: how could we force creators of these platforms to take our protection more seriously? What leverage could we have?

Harkaway: as an individual you have very little power to make that happen. As a group, you can demand much more. We as individuals whether in political context or whatever.. that's the only way to affect things. We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.

Keen: re governments/corporations, I'm not sure whether we don't hand it over willingly. We don't have it to internet companies, because certain internet companies, some in this room, can present themselves as being on the side of the consumer… It's not just about will, it's also about commitment. Political groups that have come out of social media have all failed to go from original culture of self-congratulation, that's the challenge.

4.24pm: Q: but a lot of companies are upfront about offering free services in return for your data?

Keen: who does? (questioner: Google) But where? I haven't found a place on the Google website where it says it does that. LinkedIn's terms of service is 6000 words - you'd need a lawyer to read it. I never read terms of service. Who here reads them? [About 4 people raise hands. Lawyers from Google?]

It's easy to vilify companies like Google and Facebook for leveraging, not selling, their data.

Harkaway: it's interesting if you're using a service that does that to ask yourself: if I was paying £10 per month, do I value my data higher than that? And I do.

Keen: yes but the 5bn people Eric Schmidt is welcoming will be less willing, less able to pay that, so as more and more of the developing world goes online, and the issue of identity becomes more sensitive - I gave a speech in Oslo, I was talking about personal data and impact on society, some Africans came up to me and said this was unimaginable because privacy was so essential to their societies. I fear the biggest struggle is yet to come.

4.20pm: Harkaway: Google says young people don't care about privacy, but when asked if they'd let their parents see their phone bills and other stuff they say no.

There is a sense that everything should be easy, but easy decisions are the ones we should be scared of because if they're easy then we're probably being sold something. This is why I'm worried about "nudge" - it's pushing people in the direction of what you think they should be doing. Easy decisions are dangerous ones.

Q: is there something in how piracy is done, starting with what looked like mass piracy that people shifted towards hiding their identity with VPNs? Are those a precursor of what you're hoping for?

Keen: perhaps best exampel is Spotify, Rhapsody, iTunes if it goes to subscription. There has been a shift from dodgy downloads to actually paying. We do have to rethink this idea of free. We don't demand it in any other sphere, so why do we on the internet?

Free services like Wikipedia I don't think benefit anyone - they don't benefit the professional because they're not paid.. [missed second part of his response, which looked at the other element] .. We need to be more explicit about business models.

4.15pm: Keen: Zuckerberg wants to take us back to the dorm room where we all know each other. I don't want to, I want to go to the city. Eric Schmidt said you'll have to get a new identity when you get older. Zuckerberg only wants us to have one identity.

So we don't live in the old world. But I don't want everyone to know what I've done. We all know every kind of example we could throw out there. The world we see online is very spiteful, we all know about people who have had bad stories thrown at them. If we were more generous I might be more happy about the reputation economy.

Moderator: for those who grew up without the internet, we're often scared about what will happen to children when they go for university or jobs.

Harkaway: it's a parenting issue, you have to do it publicly in the house - you have to share all this at ground level, with children it's something between parents and kids. It may be personally difficult, but if you didn't think parenting was going to be a challenge then someone misinformed you.

4.11pm: Keen: I keep getting called a luddite, I keep quoting the fictional Sean Parker in the Social Network saying first we lived in villages, then cities, then the internet.

Schmidt says the internet doesn't know how to forget, but humans do, and there are technologies that will learn how to forget. Being human in the digital world is about building a digital world for humans, we're building it.

Harkaway: this is something that we collectively have to do, make the social/digital world one where we can do something. Someone said my book is more of a digital activism book, which is true in a sense.

In 1990s we were encouraged to think by governments that we would get richer and richer, the idea of free, to believe that was what was happening. But it's not true, there are other costs. The next step is a reasonable understanding of how we want to live and how we're going to pay for it.

Keen: I'm not a libertarian. I see two influences out of Silicon Valley - this radicalised ideal of individualism coming out of this [Ayn] Randian idea and the fetishisation of the social. For many of these people the social is just a mirror of themselves. I'm not against the social, but I want something genuinely social, not something that has been fetishized as social so that a group of people can feel better about themselves.

4.07pm: Harkaway: there's a tendency to say "we'll wait until someone fixes it" but you have to make the world do what you want.

Keen: I think consumers need to be more clear about this, there's a lot of ideology about "free", that we can have free services, free content, it's one of the reasons why the music industry which I defend has been decimated. Consumers think they can have everything, from these free services, and at the same time own their own data. Google has done a good job branding itself as a public utility, but people have to get used to the idea that people have to pay for services which explicitly say they won't do anything with that data.

I give Google the benefit of the doubt, with Circles in Google+ they are trying to preserve privacy, more than Facebook, but it's these new companies which are making privacy the core of the product.

Q from Bill Thompson (whom Keen called out): the dilemma over what we can expect to get and where to get the boundaries...isn't so extreme. What is the common ground between you two?

4.02pm: Moderator: asks Keen about his complaint about digital narcissim, that we should learn from others rather than broadcasting. But there's a more interesting critique, as you go from industrial to knowledge-based, as we have more and more mobility, a radically individualised culture, these platforms become a way to peddle our brands - we're emerging into the reputation economy where platforms are the metric for it.

Cathay Pacific in its SF lounge will let you sit in their lounge if you have a Klout score above 50. [Am totally going to SF.] You can't be on Glance unless you're on Facebook. We don't have a choice about Facebook any more. The choice element is less obvious than it seems. Maybe the 1bn poor people and a few hundred thousand rich people can afford not to be on it.. the rest of us don't have any choice.

Moderator: do people know not to be online?

Harkaway: I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can't get the map to get off my page, don't want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that's your own.

We should be worrying about if you live in the city you're more likely to have anxiety or mood disorders and to be schizophrenic. More than the problems people have from social media.

Moderator: maybe that's because it's early - maybe in 10 years we will.

3.55pm: Keen suggests that we have to move away from the entirely ad-supported business because the needs of it means that it has to keep driving into privacy, and that's not good for anyone because we all need to have something about us that is secret from some people.

Now Nick Harkaway - argues that we need as humans to have social connections, that the social revolution is a change on top of another revolution.

3.50pm: And back again now with Andrew Keen, talking aout his book Digital Vertigo, and Nick Harkaway, author of The Blind Giant (subtitle: "Being human in a digital world").

The session: "Good or evil: has the social revolution enhanced or diminished our society?"

Keen is well-known as someone who is suspicious about digitalisation turning us into less surprising beings. Harkaway is far less extreme - he's more of an observer.

Keen talking, quotes Schmidt about how identity is defined by others rather than ourselves - "I find that troubling, the internet hasn't learnt how to forget".

2.32pm: And that's the Eric Schmidt talk done. Comment: interesting how hard he pushed back on the EC antitrust thing. It was the one key point where eh resisted the suggestion completely.

2.28pm: Q: Google keeps manipulating search, we'll have a narrower internet, eventually of just one. That must be a bad thing.

Schmidt: a lot of people have your concern, so far it does not seem to be true. Personalisation doesn't produce that effect. And you can always search anonymously to get the "generic" result.

2.25pm: Q: Google Buzz led to FTC investigation, then there was Street View and the Wi-Fi data grab, and then the Safari cookie hack. Does Google have a management problem?

Schmidt. The three things were separate and were not approved or were mistakes. Wi-Fi was a mistake, we reported it when we found out. The Safari one is more complicated because it's about industry practice.

Over and over again we are pushing the envelope, sometimes we get it wrong and we apologise.

Moderator: but it's about culture, does your culture encourage them to push things where they think they're doing the right thing, but in fact it's illegal?

Schmidt: you're making the classic journalistic mistake, taking three things out of 10,000, we've spent a lot of time with our employes explaining these things.

The people involved thought they were doing the right thing, but in fact they were doing the wrong thing.

2.19pm: Q: CP Snow suggested that industrialisation would remove global poverty by 2000 - are we too optimistic about communications tech?

Schmidt: it's had a huge impact on 2bn people who have gone from poverty to lower-middle class. It will give them access, not free but cheap.

Q: you feel Google's role is to make sure people have access to information. Aleks was talking about the next step, serendipity, what you start to do with that information. Is the future of Google how people use information or just providing it?

Schmidt: what I think future of Google is - these 10 links we provide, trying to go from that kind of answer to an insightful answer, like who is the PM of Britain. Our AI is getting good enough that we'll go from syntax to semantics, and we'll be offering that.

Q: when a Google autonomous car?

Schmidt: they're amazing to be in... you'll treat it more as an autopilot or cruise control.

Moderator: why did you do it?

Schmidt: (flapping his arms) because it's fun. It has nothing to do with search. It's just fun. We have because of Google Maps, accurate maps - Larry thought it was cool.

2.15pm: Q: antitrust - EC says it wants remedies - is Google accepting penalties down the line?

Schmidt: I had a nice conversation with the commssioner, and a letter on Monday, in our conversation and in his letter and my response we've agreed to have further discussions, the letter is all we've heard from them, we haven't heard the details, I'm not going to speculate on the details.

Q: but you must know what they are. Seems like you're not playing ball. If you don't accept these remedies...those four areas.. you're not answering the question here. Surprised you don't have a better response.

Schmidt: he hasn't told us... you and I don't agree [to questioner]. He is encouraging us to have conversation. We completely agree [to that]. We disagre that we are in violation in general. Until they are precise about what areas of the law we have violated it will be very difficult for me to speculate. Google actually wants data - give us the precise example, the precise problem, we don't know yet.

2.12pm: Q: your social strategy - rumours that Google+ hasn't realised success you were hoping for. And place of social in Google and in the search engine?

Schmidt: this is a rumour creating a target we didn't say about internal goals we don't have comparing us to a rival that's very well managed and has been around 12 years. [Facebook? It's 8.]

Our Google+ efforts did start in the last 6-12 months... now more tha n150m users. They are using in ways that make sense to us, Hangouts seems to be the current breakout product. For us there's value in creating that social graph. Don't you think YouTube would be better if we have better information about your friends, with your permission? Don't you think we'll have better info for search if we have those signals ... we are already seeing that in our core business. Google+ is doing better than I expected given the difficulty of entering the market.

2.10pm: Moderator: Motorola deal, where's it going?

Schmidt: we wanted a stake in hardware businesses, we closed as of this morning in Chicago, right now, so there's a meeting of the employees. As part of that we'll be announcing the things we'll be doing with Motorola. More investment in products and a lot more focus on Android and the tools even than they have today.

Questions from audience: Index on Censorship: are you saying Google won't push back boundaries on censorship?

Schmidt: trying to avoid fight with governments, saying these are principles we care about.

2.08pm: Moderator: do younger not care about privacy?

Schmidt: younger people don't seem at first to care, but record of what you did 10 -20 years ago used to be hard to find, now it's easy to find.

But say you're 18 and you're falsely accused of something, and the trial acquits you. In the old day the records would be sealed, but now even with UK privacy it would be leaked - we've had examples in Britain of things being leaked. Once published, not deletable.

Moderator: you'll maintain neutrality about what apps do?

Schmidt: for apps, primarily for Android, we won't police them ahead of time unlike Apple which does a sort of micromanagement of the apps ahead of time. We prefer a reactive model.

Moderator: why? Because you have less to do or because you favour openness?

Schmidt: I hope it's the latter though there's a little of the former.

2.04pm: Moderator: the argument is you treat your search results differently for your products - do you?

Schmidt: the way we've designed Google is pro-competitive and good for users. If not we want to hear why.

Moderator: Is it an attack on freedom of speech?

Schmidt: Don't want to get into that, our success is determined by being one click away, competitor on click away, we have to be honest with the user. We have the onebox, so that's where it gets tricky.

Moderator: has the privacy question moved on with the argument about apps and privacy agreements?

Schmidt: privacy is going to be a concern for a long time, the thing that's different is the way that people publish stuff about themselves, and it can't be taken back. If your born today your identity gets defined more by other people than by you.

We think you should be able to edit the data about you in Google via the [privacy] dashboard. There will always be issues around this.

2.02pm: Schmidt: if you're going to make a law, make a law that actually works. It's extraordinarily difficult [to make a law that works technically][.

The best practices we know is where it's noticed by other people when uploaded and then taken down. Pre-screening would effectively eliminate the internet as we know it.

Moderator: EC saying you have to change way you do search resultys. Will you change?

Schmidt: we're going to have a meeting. We think we're pretty OK, we're consistent with European and local law. Don't want to prejudge what we'll do before we hear what they want to do.

Moderator: this was portrayed as a bit dismissive.

Schmidt: we're not aware of anything we've done wrong, but we're prepared to be educated to the contrary.

1.59pm: Schmidt: it bothers me as an American [re computer programming] that you have not remained in the lead on this. Computer curriculum has changed.

Choice A is that Britain can be a good farming island with good services and pleasant people. Or it can be a knowledge workers' island for the whole world. One is much better suited.

The change is well understood. Britain is among the most-connected nations, so you have a lot of things going on for you.

Moderator: censorship of porn? What's your advice to government?

Schmidt: Each country makes a different decision on adult pornography, but the good news is that even governments you hate, hate child pornography.

What I worry about is that such laws are often slippery slopes, such a law has to be defined very precisely and technical can be implemented. In many other countries adult pornography legislation is an attempt to legislate something else.

1.56pm: Moderator: so what is Google's role in that?

Schmidt: our mission is to get the world's information to you... so we don't judge about that. We care a lot about openness, to the extent that governments are more open and honest we think that's positive.

Moderator: the 5bn...

Schmidt: In Africa you find children don't have textbooks so they teach using Google, shows you how inventive people are. To the 5bn - openness and transparency in how governments work, connectivity for individuals.

Moderator: how does an organisation like Google help stop technology simply putting people out of work?

Schmidt: Google is not a jobs program for people put out of work... answer is education. If you thought when you got your job at 20 that it would never change you were misinformed. Retrain yourself to be curious.

If you thought the model was learn in college and high school and then stop, you wre misinformed. [Note how he doesn't say "wrong".]

Look at the automated loom and what that did to the work of sheep herders [shepherds?]. They got through it.

1.51pm: Schmidt: But there are people who are coming out of poverty, it will affect them.

You can understand Tunisia revolution as a failure to censor the internet. And Libya had that failure too. It's very difficult for governments that are autocratic and don't have broad popular support to be in power when a lot of people have these devices. That was what Arab Spring was about, that people could express this and lead to revolution.

Moderator: could it be an instrument of control?

Schmidt: China is an experiment - you can see it as a success of censoring the elite but not most. If you look at Weibo then when they try to cover up a train accident or other crisis people use it to complain, that does put pressure on an autocratic government. Even those sorts of governments are sensitive to shame and embarrassment, you can hold them to some level of accountability.

Moderator: what's role of technology in economic crisis?

Schmidt: look at where it isn't - it's not uniform, Brazil is growing. Global financial crisis was caused by errors in management of cash. But also nature of globalisation. You can't put a fence around an island like Britain. Globalisation is here to stay.

Another factor is rate at which businesses are automating. Bad news is that automation prevents businesses hiring for another job they don't need. To create jobs you have to come up with investments and you have to do that in the face of knowledge workers and financial crisis.

1.47pm: Moderator apologises for the heat. It is baking. Well, -ish. Worse for the people outside serving hot food wearing dark clothes under a transparent plastic roof.

And now Eric Schmidt, Google executive chairman.

Schmidt: If I go through the headlines for the next 5-10 years more people are going to be joining the conversation. About a billion smartphones, now, 2 billion people connected to the internet, so the next 5-10 years according to what estimates, reasonable to expect another 5 bn. Most will be on mobile phones, presently about 5bn mobile phones of which 4bn are featurephones.

They will love their smartphone more than you do because it's how they get educated, they will use Wi-Fi rather than data networks.

Moderator: how big will the divide be? The internet still will not touch many people.

Schmidt: people who have nothing will still get something. You will be able to do things in first world like robotic holography.. but everyone benefits, there's a problem in the world with the bottom 1bn, but they're the hardest ones to solve, they have corrupt governments, high infant mortality.

1.43pm: And we're back and waiting for Eric Schmidt to appear and tell us about "5 billion voices" - which we assume is those voice on the internet.

12.35pm: Q from member of the Music Managers' Forum: every year music industry revenues going down, but aggregators like Apple or Huffington Post doing well. We need legislation... a carrot and stick

Linehan: the sticks at the moment are terrible. The piracy warnings are terrible, three strikes is terrible.

Hyman: better education is the thing. Start respecting people, treat them as fans. On teh aggregator point, I'm torn - the music industry artists have never had that easy a time. Now rather than the labels making the money it's aggregators and retailers. But question is how you get money to artists.

Linehan: the love that's out there - when you see a favourite creator launching something on Kickstarter, there was the guy who did DoubleFine Games to get point-and-click adventure games because he couldn't get it funded - raised $3m in 28 days, because he went on Kickstarter with a great video to drum up the business. It's seen as humiliating to go to consumers asking for money, but why not?

I think films would get a lot better if people paid leaving the cinema. There's a whole business plan of opening terrible films in hundreds of cinemas and then closing them when the word of mouth gets out.

--and that's the end of the copyright panel. Join us again at 1345 BST for Eric Schmidt's thoughts on what life will be like with 5bn people connected to the internet - many of them not via a desktop or laptop.

12.30pm: Taylor: for recorded music if people want to interact with it at home, great, there will be some interactions that people won't like - you might not want the BNP doing things with it, Graham [Linehan] may feel the same. But the original artist needs to be paid.

The Limewire case - that was huge. BPI has never said that every illegal download is a lost sale, we said 1.2bn downloads of illegal music files in the UK in 2011. About 7m people regularly downloading, you can get a pretty good picture. In terms of how much that loses you have to do some modelling, so we reckon we lose a couple of hundred million pounds, in a billion-pound industry.

But we have to tackle sites like Pirate Bay which are making money off illegal content.

Q: Apple is biggest threat to music by taking 30% off every sale?

Message: Apple takes a retail margin, you can do a non-exclusive deal, you can sell what you like off your own website for superfans, you can mop up casual punters.. it's there for people with casual habits - others will go through the pain of going through band's site for discovery. Apple for me is a good sales channel, for us as artists technology has made creation of content much easier.

Q but their retailing has a different form, they aren't earning that 30%?

Yaylor: that 30% cut is high but Apple created an ecosystem that is really good, generating money for our artists. We'd love to see Google launch such a great music service. [Yes, where is Google Music in Europe?]

Message: high street is tough, you sell on sale or return and stuff might come back a couple of years later... Internet [retailing] is good.

12.26pm: Q: odd how solution always seems to be more legislation with these problems. People were torrenting The It Crowd in the US because they had no legal access to it.

Linehan: another thing I don't agree with is the term piracy and the way it's been co-opted as something to be proud of, it puts people at opposite ends of the spectrum. These people aren't pirates, they're fans, I love them, and if they pay for it I love them even more. Let's find a way to do it.

Q: What about remix - the Downfall meme on the net where users take something and do a parody or spoof and get a great deal of enjoyment.

Message: It's great creativity, the more people doing that the better. The copyright debate is a heavy one in our [music] industry but we have to evolve it, board meetings at UK Music have to be less about copyright and legislation and move the debate on.

Hyman: you have to respect the artist's wishes, if they don't want it messed with, don't. But core issue is that framework for rights doesn't allow that flexibility. I would prefer it if someone like Creative Commons were thinking about how to push this stuff forward. Let people show that they're fans. You need a rights framework - the best I've seen is Creative Commons.

12.23pm: Linehan asked what he would say if independent study found that he could raise income by 50% if illegal downloads were stopped. He says he'd wonder how he could persuade them.

Spencer Hyman says games industry saw what was coming early on - moved away from something you put in a machine and press play. So with World of Warcraft you have to deal with what the internet enables, you have to be in the community, you have to do more.

12.18pm: Back to Taylor: I don't share Spencer [Hyman] that copyright isn't fit for purpose, copyright's doing what it should making sure people get paid, Graham gets his royalties from his programs.

At the BPI we run an innovation panel with labels and startups and try to get new ideas for launches. If you do nothing at all though about piracy it's very difficult for those tech businesses to grow - we've got to work this out with business solutions, why is it that when you search for Radiohead MP3 all the results are illegal, the top result should be the legal one.

Brian Message: for years the suggestion is that copyright is this great tool to finance becoming professional artists - but we can now crowdsource funding for our acts, we can put out music and get people in hundreds of companies, and say "come and be a part of the act", that removes copyright's stranglehold.

12.13pm: So, over to Geoff Taylor. Things we've really turned a corner, more digital music services in the UK than anywhere in the world - they're going well, about 80. But still music industry revenue is declining, and when talking to session musicians, others, they're feeling it - albums that used to sell 100K now sell 30K. We do have to get to grips with people making a lot of money from piracy and get that back into the legal business.

Brian Message (Radiohead manager): what I'm seeing and experiencing is that professional creators have huge opportunities for revenue, recorded music is smaller but capability for discovery is allowing us to grow our business in an exciting way. Having direct access to artists and consumers - frictionless as possible - that's the nub of it.

Spencer Hyman: have a look at the "Gutenberg Parenthesis" - before Gutenberg, you could all be performers and the good ones got paid. Then Gutenberg meant good writers could get paid and copyright was a wall around it. What Brian [Message] is saying is right - but challenges what copyright is built on.

Nobody talks about search engines in these copyright reports like Hargreaves - these key technologies should tell people things about things. Art has never had anything like radio, telling you what to do and find.

12.09pm: Moderator: 40bn music files shared illegally online last year. So that means that creators are losing hope of making a living from their creations - but we have to protect. So Graham Linehan - you have to get paid, surely.

Linehan: yup. (Pauses a long time.) I came here because there are certain things about the way the entertainment industry has been talking to me as a consumer that I find offensive. As a creator I did a search for IT Crowd and someone said on Twitter "downloading the IT Crowd", and I said "buy it if you like it", and he said "what's it to you" and someone else said "He wrote it, dude." I don't see why we are constantly resorting to holding a gun to their head and telling them what to do. 20 years ago there was a campaign in the Independent for cheaper CDs. Pre-internet, it didn't get a head of steam. And the music indsutry response was "no". Now, the consumers are the ones who when asked "will you stop downloading" are the ones who say "no".

Didn't want to suggest ways of solving it, but to suggest we move on past these twin poles.

12.07pm: Next up is a panel on Copyright issues - participants:

Graham Linehan

, writer of Father Ted and other works; Spencer Hyman (Artfinder, a London startup to help folk find art; formerly at Last.fm); Brian Message (chairman, Music Managers' Forum, and Radiohead's manager); Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI, aka record labels in the UK.

12.00pm: Q: text processing: ....copyright stands in the way, what will you do?

Willetts: it's a tricky challenge, Hargreaves [Report on copyright] has helped, providing framework for academic data... work on common standards... there's a lot of work going on here - this goes back to academic publishing, one of the things they do is common standards that makes their texts all accessible. Government absolutely recognises this.

Q: someone who graduated 10 ya, was refused bank loan because of his debt - now earns as much as an MP but has student debt.

Willetts: what was your debt? [£12-13,000 startup loan.] At the moment in the current system you pay back 9% on earnings above 21K. It's an obligation to pay back through the tax system. But you're right about the threshold, so they will in future pay back less than you do. Financial services say they look at fixed monthly outgoings - 9% on 15K against 25K salary (he has to do the maths in his head - brutal in front of this audience) - you're paying back for longer now but we smooth it out.

Q: but bank says it's debt, you can't get loan for a startup.

Willetts: it's not a debt that's taken account of in bankruptcy - it's not a mortgage or credit card debt or bank loan, it's saying you'll pay a higher rate of income tax until you have paid back your higher education. Financial services looks at monthly outgoings. [Yes, but that's an outgoing.] It's not debt, not commercial debt.

And there you go - end of session. That seems to be an unsatisfactory answer - bigger debts mean bigger monthly outgoings.

11.57am: Q: suggestions that we need 200-400K more people with IT skills in the next years... that there's less interest in it in schools - computer science graduates among highest unemployed rate [are they? Surprising]. What needs to be done?

Willetts: the problem was being discussed by experts until Eric Schmidt with his McTaggart lecture brought it into the open, that energised the debate. We had done some things, like competitions for teenagers to proposa and write apps for mobile phones, and Google and others trying to bring curriculum to life, but computer science curriculum just seemed catastophitcally to be very boring and putting people off. Michael [Gove] is dealing with this at a school level, we are promoting links with business and universities.

Moderator: when see this in schools?

Willetts: Michael [Gove] has cancelled old one, moving to one where we have a creative constructor-producer model, understand that over next year it will evolve into a proper ccurriculum.

11.55am: Q: should taxpayer-funded research be published in openaccess and free publication?

Willetts: in favour of open access to publicly funed research. Academic journalis add value, they aren't parasitical extractors of rent, we have asked Janet Finch to report to use on how we get there. One route is the gold route - where you say instead of academic research being paid for by the university library or individual, part of the research grant includes a payment for release of the data.

Second model is green access, where you require that the material be available publicly but in order for the journals to remain viable you have a half-life rule - six to 12 months - where it's available for subscribers and then becomes available. Janet Finch will advise, will probably be a mixture of gold and green.

11.50am: Shift to virtual world going to transform everything about his work as a minister. Will still have physical places, but eg some law faculties don't have library because it's online. Different institutions have different mix of physical and virtual - eg Open University.

But also research - last year 1.7m research article, 400K of them in British-based journals. We're trying to get our heads around the big changes being made here, announcing today opening of Open Data Institute.

Next generation of research going to require data mining and text mining so that medics for example who can't physically be expected to read articles on their specialism will be able to have sophisticated sorting and ranking to access information they need.

Looking at scientific inquiry, next paradigm will be based on very large datasets. Scientists are in the lead in handling very large datasets - Hubble telescope or Large Hadron Collider are massive datasets.

In UK still have specific skills in production of software - want more links between academics that have skills and companies that need skills, eg for prototyping of car parts. Most exciting thing that the experts say is that - rather like the Persian king who offers an inventor a reward - he asks for a grain of wheat on first chess square, then 2 on next, then 4 then 8... we are now on the second half of the chessboard.

..(speech ends - had been expecting more on open access. Perhaps in the questions.)

11.45am: Willetts: challenge as university minister is about getting right balance of teaching and research. Think it's right to expect graduates to pay back once earning more than £21,000 per year. That shift away from grants from the government and to payback by students has enabled increase in cash to teaching in universities in this Parliament.

Also more cooperation between institutes.

11.39am: Willetts points to paradox of being in a room of experts in the web who come to a physical place for the exchange of ideas.

Willetts: looks tanned, light suit, no tie, is that a linen shirt? Really not the picture of a Whitehall minister that you would have had a few years ago - which would have been dark blue suit, white shirt, tie. And glasses, in Willetts's case.

Takling about clustering and how in a mobile society people still need to meet up to exchange ideas. Important for science and education, creativity comes from dense clusters. There are small clusters and larger ones: one definition of small cluster is place where you can change jobs without changing where you park a car.

We cluster to be innovative... Tech City is about that, Google Shoreditch campus, commitment to clusters from government.

Bigger clusters.. places where you can move jobs without having to move family.One of the theories about Silicon Valley is that the striking down of non-compete clauses in contracts helped creation of jobs there. Academics and VCs in Oxford and Cambridge ask for fast transport link between Oxford and Cambridge - used to have rail line, now torn up; want to be able to move Oxford-Cambridge-London without moving family.

11.38am: We're back with David Willetts, the higher education and science minister, speaking (Nicknamed "Two Brains" in Westminster, we're reminded.)

10.58am: Porn debate over. Conclusion: no conclusion. Sarah Hunter, Google's public policy director, says obligatory filters are a bad idea. Amanda Platell of the Daily Mail says they're a good idea. Index On Censorship and TalkTalk don't like much either.

In about 20 minutes we'll have David Willetts giving a keynote. Stay tuned!

10.44am: Hunter of Google: my son is a brilliant user of the iPad.. think we are the generation that is at sea on this one. (Says she grew up without internet, but her kids have grown up with it.)

(Hunter by the way is head of Public Policy, Government and Parliamentary relationships for Google in the UK .)

Hughes of IoC points out that what was declared obscene a century ago is now accepted as OK. (True, though it's a bit hard to know what will and won't be acceptable in a century - think of the language you can't use now that you did then.)

(Certain element of talking past each other in this. Nobody is quite engaging. IoC feels as absolute as does the Daily Mail position enunciated by Platell.)

Q: we find that education is the best filter (from an Australian journalist) - that using mobile gets kids engaged. That some schools are taking filters down. And makes the very good point that "it's a little hypocritical to be discussing this without a teenager up there on the stage." (Best comment of the day.)

Q: isn't this really an education problem, it's not a technological solution.

Show of hands about whether govt should legislate a TalkTalk system - a handful of hands. About three. Should you go further to Daily Mail system? Only Platell's hand is up.

10.38am: Someone from Cabinet Office asks for empirical evidence on this. Sarah Hunter of Google says that it's rather hard to find the control group where you have a parent saying "sure, test porn on my 7yo."

Q: we have age filters on movies. You need ID. Why is there such a concern about censorship if we apply filtering.

Hughes of IoC: these filters are blocking across the board, if you say everyone who has computer connection has to have default switches on that's like saying nobody can go to over-18 film or browse bookshop.

Hunter: definition of porn and porn sites isn't set, there's no previewing of porn sites to get age ratings. And block lists are drawn up in secret. Mobile filters - show sites blocked by O2 and Orange... what is worrying is that when site owner says that they're legal the carriers can't unblock them.

Platell for : isn't that something you can legislate against, you know who censors are for films, you should know what's being blocked.

Hughes of IoC says that proposals are like keeping everyone out unless they opt in, ie proving you're over 18.

Moderator: I was going to go to Twitter but #bigtentuk seems to have been spammed on Twitter...

10.30am: Platell says it's about being able to block stuff that is gross.

Hughes of IoC says we shouldn't be putting default switch on that puts adults into same category as children. If it's too hard (oo-er) for them.

Moderator: is pornography a big driver, how much money does Google make out of pornography?

Sarah Hunter of Google: we don't go out of our way - but it's legal, automated systems, allow people to advertise against legal content. As long as we put in sufficent safeguards for children. Pornhub [getting huge amount of publicity today....] wasn't initially blocked by TalkTalk filters - so filters aren't perfect, can't give parents a sense that it's all perfect.

Q from floor: is legislation to opt in for porn ultimately futile?
Sarah Hunter: SafeSearch can do something but for 14yo boys there's a limit on what you can do. Parents have to sit with their children when they're very young and have grown-up convos. Legislation would be a mistake.

Heaney of TalkTalk: yes you do get over- and under-blocking.

(Everyone seems to be agreeing that it's really very difficult, though Platell is out on a limb in wanting obligatory blocks and legislation.)

Hughes of IoC says her worry is about government saying there should be a filter on legal content.

10.23am: Now getting into the question of whether you would have political filters, morality filters, and so on. Heaney of TalkTalk says that you can do blocks on games sites. Nobody has quite gotten to Platell's point yet about accessibility, or got an answer here.

(Just as a reminder, I tried to tackle this question with Worried about online porn? Don't regulate the net – regulate your kids. Not sure if Platell has read it.)

Q from father of an 8yo: what's missing is personalisation - devices, context of the person's use. Network filtering can transcend location and control what child sees on multiple devices but it's up to the parent - don't need ISP making decision. Education is important.

Q "someone saying Mail is leading campaign against porn, I've gone onto Mail Online... steamy sex scene with Carey Mulligan, watch the video now."

Platell: I wouldn't have a problem with my kids seeing this today, but I do have a problem with Pornhub, Leonardo di Caprio isn't going to be tying her up...

Graham Linehan, from the floor, suggests search on Mail Online "all grown up" because that's about children who are now legal. Mail Online regularly does articles about child stars who are now 16. It means "this person is now available for sex." Says it's ironic that Mail is running anti-porn campaign while running pictures of people in bikinis.

10.18am:
Platell quotes stats about how many children have seen porn before age of 16. Concern seems to be that it's affecting middle-class images. "These images are so damaging". Moderator asks if she's in favour of censorship. She says yes, in some circumstances.

Google's Sarah Hunter says "we believe children shouldn't be seeing porn online. We don't want children to be unsafe online. Google also says: it's not that easy. Solutions being discussed aren't perfect. There are problems - deskilling parents by giving them solution that aren't themselves perfect. So most important thing is making sure parents know the risks children face online, give tools to protect children.

Q: can a clever teenager get around it?
Andrew Heaney: yes - it's one of many things.

Amanda Platell looking like she owns the sofa.
Lawyer Mark Stephens, former defender of Julian Assange, says that this is just an update of the porn mags of the earlier days.

Platell says that the images are completely different. Pornhub had pics of a woman being stripped and then forced to perform oral sex on another woman while.... OK, that's quite graphic, Amanda.

10.12am: First up is a session on pornography, Krishnan Guru-Murphy moderating, Amanda Platell from the Daily Mail leading for the anti-porn brigade: says she looked up Pornhub last night. Unsurprisingly, it was a bit shocking.

Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk saying it's too easy to slip over into censorship, that you shouldn't have a default block.

The Big Tent is at the Grove Hotel in sunny Hertfordshire. And boy, it's hot. Apparently last week they were ordering industrial heaters. Quick check on the weather forecast, and they swapped the order for industrial air conditioners.

The Big Tent is going on now - and here's the liveblog.

Posted on the 23rd of May at about 3PM.

Law firm Robbins Geller co-ordinating class lawsuit alleging that Facebook and its bankers cut their revenue growth forecasts

Facebook, Morgan Stanley and some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley are being pursued over the social network's disastrous share sale by the law firm that won a $7bn settlement for Enron's shareholders.

Robbins Geller is co-ordinating a class action lawsuit alleging that Facebook and its bankers misled investors about the true state of their business while informing a handful of privileged clients about the company's true prospects.

The lawsuit, filed in New York, names Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, as a defendant, as well as top Silicon Valley investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Barclays Capital.

It comes as US regulators announced they are investigating the handling of Facebook's initial public offering (IPO). More shareholder lawsuits are expected.

In its suit, Robbins Geller alleges that Facebook bankers cut their forecasts for the company's revenue growth during the middle of their IPO roadshow – when bankers and Facebook executives including founder Mark Zuckerberg met analysts and potential investors.

Reuters reported this week that in the run-up to the IPO Morgan Stanley told some major clients that consumer internet analyst Scott Devitt had cut his revenue forecasts for the Facebook.

On Tuesday Massachusetts' secretary of commonwealth William Galvin sent a subpoena to Morgan Stanley demanding more details.

Analysts are required to act independently of investment bakers, a stipulation that followed Wall Street's settlement with US regulators after the dotcom bubble scandal. Speaking on condition of anonymity, another internet analyst said it was highly unusual for an analyst at an IPO's lead banker to cut forecasts so late in a share sale.

Facebook had previously amended its prospectus (known as an S-1 filing) to warn that its users were increasingly using mobile devices and the firm, as yet, makes little money from those users.

"The true facts at the time of the IPO were that Facebook was then experiencing a severe and pronounced reduction in revenue growth due to an increase of users of its Facebook app or website through mobile devices rather than a traditional PC such that the company told the underwriter defendants to materially lower their revenue forecasts for 2012," according to Robbins Geller's suit.

The defendants "selectively disclosed" to "certain preferred investors" the cuts in their own forecasts for Facebook, the suit alleges.

In a statement, Morgan Stanley said: "Morgan Stanley followed the same procedures for the Facebook offering that it follows for all IPOs. These procedures are in compliance with all applicable regulations.

"After Facebook released a revised S-1 filing on May 9 providing additional guidance with respect to business trends, a copy of the amendment was forwarded to all of MS's institutional and retail investors, and the amendment was widely publicized in the press at the time.

"In response to the information about business trends, a significant number of research analysts in the syndicate who were participating in investor education reduced their earnings views to reflect their estimate of the impact of the new information. These revised views were taken into account in the pricing of the IPO."

Robbins Geller is one of the most successful class action law firms in the US and helped Enron investors recover over $7bn from the institutions that helped finance the Texan energy company ahead of its collapse.

Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago-based securities attorney, said Facebook would be "sucked into the vortex" of this lawsuit but that Morgan Stanley faced the greater risk.

"Federal securities law is very clear – it requires full disclosure. Any information about earnings or revenues would have to be disclosed equally. Ultimately the underwriter, which has done hundreds of these things, is responsible," he said.

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I think Warren Buffet is right to buy news organizations, and I wish I had his money so I could too. And so is Chris Hughes for buying New Republic.

Working news organizations are much more valuable than most people think. You just have to change the context to see that, and project out a few years.

It's all going to change when Twitter buys one of those new organizations. That's when the lightbulbs will go on for the owners of what remains of the worldwide news industry. Because if you change context, you see the news people as a leg-up for the owner of one online news network in competition with the others. A decent portion of the value of those online systems will be in people. Programmers matter, as do support people, testers, people who can keep data centers humming, and people who have their fingers on the pulse of what's happening in business, government, sports, education, travel, food, movies, theater, music, weather, science (I'm just running through the sections of a newspaper).

That's why I've been encouraging the owners of these news orgs to invest in RSS-based news delivery systems. Rivers that gather up quality news flows. That's PE. Most of them don't see it. I bet Hughes and Buffet do. It's so simple. News is one of the big ingredients in the future of networks.

Posted on the 21st of May at about 1PM.

Google's problem is they used Facebook as their guide to upgrading their view of what the Internet is. And that led them away from their strength, and into what I think is a dead-end. Much as Microsoft was led into a dead-end by the web in the 1990s.

The problem with Facebook's approach is more than it has centralized all access to user's data, which they have. They've also centralized the flow of new ideas to the Internet. If you buy the idea that Facebook is the Internet, which is of course the problem for Facebook. Because no matter how big they get, they're still just part of the Internet. All the devices people use to access Facebook can access other parts of the Internet. So if something more exciting comes along, people can get there.

No problem, you say, because Facebook is a very innovative company. But it is a problem, because that's the Facebook of yesterday. The one that occupied a small suite of offices in downtown Palo Alto. That was two iterations of Facebook ago. And they're working on the third iteration. Each is much huger than the previous. And they are all hiring out of the general talent pool of tech.

At best, they can produce a stream of innovation equal to 1.5 previous Facebooks, and that would be a victory. The model for everyone for scaling a company and still producing new products, and new ideas, is of course Apple. But I'd argue that the Apple of the 1980s was far more innovative than the Apple of the last ten years. They took huge unprecedented steps every couple of years. Today's Apple, and there's nothing wrong with this by the way, takes them every five to seven years. And they aren't as big, they're more evolutionary, more refinements of previous stuff. Re-releases. Like Pixar, they ship a new Toy Story every few years.

The value of the Internet is that it represents a common set of protocols and formats that are very widely implemented. Everywhere human beings are you will find HTTP and HTML. Even in space. Even at the poles. Even in the jungle. Or the core of our cities. It is even possible to add new stuff to that. But please study how that happens. Sure some of it comes from the big companies, but lots of it comes from the people. Some of it comes from young people, and some of it comes from people in their 40s, 50s and 60s.

Back in the 90s, there were only three stories carried by the press. Let's see if I remember them:

1. Apple is dead.

2. Microsoft is evil.

3. Java is the future.

Never mind whether they were true or not, what's important was that with the benefit of hindsight we see that these were not the only stories. Just the ones that reporters pushed. Even though they used Apple products, and if they had studied hsitory of tech cycles, they would have known that Microsoft was in its twilight of dominance, and that languages don't change things the way Sun and Netscape wanted us to think they do.

All along, however, all the way from the beginning of my career as a technologist in the 1970s, to the present, there has been the idea that big companies make innovation. This is the biggest impediment to actual innovation. It means that investment dollars go to the wrong places. That people are driven to become big just to innovate. Which is as silly is waiting to be happy until you're rich. By the time you get there, the sex sucks and the innovation is a memory. Instead you're mired in politics, and turf wars and strategy taxes, and execs lack the intuition they had when they were founders because now they live like almost no one else does. Even Steve Jobs drifted away from his roots as he aged. You have to work at staying in it.

If the past is a predictor, here's what will happen. Facebook will exist for a long time to come. They're huge. They've absorbed a lot of the growth of Silicon Valley. They're the continuation of companies like Sun and Netscape, Apple and H-P. Google is out there too, but they are imho where Microsoft was in the 1990s. They too will be here for a long time because it's very rare for companies as large and diverse as Google to go down quickly. It usually takes a generation or two, and sometimes they figure out how to be in it much longer.

But again, if the past is a predictor, new ideas will take root among users and those ideas will grow into the next layer of tech. That's a good place to put your attention too.

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Posted on the 20th of May at about 8PM.

I'm working on the top-level user interface for the worldoutline software, and have decided, for now at least, that blorkmarks will be a top level feature. I could leave them out in the first version, and introduce the concept as an upgrade a few months after the initial release. I might still do that. But I wanted to see if I could explain what they are to the relatively technical people who read this blog.

The core idea in the worldoutline is that you can put a marker on a headline that says this place begins a new space. Which allows you to use the outliner to organize all your spaces.

This way of organizing has lots of advantages. It lets you view a blog as a structure of documents you can edit. And it can allow you to fork off a new blog without increasing the complexity of the world you manage. This is something you're constantly fighting. A lot of spaces shouldn't overly complicate your life.

So how does a seam get expressed? How are these markers implemented? You could either come up with a web service that takes a name and tells you how to find your way to that place, or you could use a system that already does most of the job, DNS. This is one of my basic design principles. When possible use already-deployed and widely-supported protocols instead of inventing new ones. Lots of good reasons for this. That's why I used DNS. It scales, it's widely deployed, and I've always felt it was under-utilized, that there was a lot of power there lying dormant.

So here's how it works from a user standpoint. I put the cursor on a headline, and choose the Add Blorkmark command. It suggests a name, which I can override. Then it makes a call to a server which in turn calls Amazon's Route53, to register a cname, and associate it with the node you're pointing to. It takes 20 to 40 seconds for Amazon to do its work. And after that you have a way to get to this place. To the reader it looks as if it's a world unto itself, but in your view of the world, it's just a corner inside a bigger outline. A possibly much bigger outline, containing many such spaces.

The path to the node is stored locally on your machine and on your worldoutline server. If you move it, no problem, the marker moves with it. So that's what a blorkmark is. It's something like a bookmark, but it points into content both in the place you edit it and in the place people read it.

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Today's milestone ride -- all the way round the park -- with confidence.

I had been taking a shortcut, eliminating the steepest part of the ride in Central Park, around the top of the park. I had ridden it before and always had found the hill a bit too much for my legs and my lungs.

This morning the conditions were ideal, I was feeling good, it was a very comfortable 60 degrees, no cars, not too much bike traffic and no pedestrians, so I went for it. Yes! It was very doable. I'm in good shape for this hill. Knock wood, IANAL, MMLM and all the usual disclaimers.

Also, no matter how early you get out on a spring morning there's always something big going on in the park. Today it's the AIDS Walk. Hasn't started yet, but you can tell there will be a hundred thousand people walking where I was riding today. Things in NY scale like that. And Central Park is probably nothing like Olmstead imagined it, as a place for contemplation. It is, however, a place where the people of the city mingle. All classes, it seems. And people from all over the world.

And since this may be the only blog post today, I'd like to add that Nic Cubrilovic probably summed up Zuck's fabulous weekend best, from a male point of view. "How can you beat IPO and married in the same weekend?" he said "Err, IPO and not married." My guess is that Zuck liked things pretty much as they were. But of course I'm projecting!

Today's map: 47 minutes, 8.30 miles, average 10.58 mph.

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Posted on the 19th of May at about 7PM.

If you've studied design at all, you've probably encountered Lorem Ipsum placeholder text at some point. Anywhere there is text, but the meaning of that text isn't particularly important, you might see Lorem Ipsum.

Most people recognize it as Latin. And it is. But it is arbitrarily rearranged and not quite coherent Latin, extracted from a book Cicero wrote in 45 BC. Here's the complete quote, with the bits and pieces that make up Lorem Ipsum highlighted.

Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga.

But what does it all mean? Here's an English translation with the same parts highlighted.

Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

Of course the whole point of Lorem Ipsum is that the words aren't supposed to mean anything, so attempting to divine its meaning is somewhat … unsatisfying, perhaps by design. Lorem Ipsum is a specific form of what is generally referred to somewhat cheekily as "Greeking":

Greeking is a style of displaying or rendering text or symbols, not always from the Greek alphabet. Greeking obscures portions of a work for the purpose of either emphasizing form over details or displaying placeholders for unavailable content. The name is a reference to the phrase "Greek to me", meaning something that one cannot understand, so that it might as well be in a foreign language.

So when you need filler or placeholder text, you naturally reach for Lorem Ipsum as the standard. The theory is that, since it's unintelligible, nobody will attempt to read it, but instead focus on other aspects of the design. If you put readable text in the design, people might think the text is important to the design, that the text represents the sort of content you expect to see, or that the text somehow itself needs to be copyedited and updated and critiqued.

(Regular readers of this blog may remember that I am fond of using Alice in Wonderland in this manner, when I need a bit of text to demonstrate something in a post.)

However, not everyone agrees that relying on a standard boilerplate greeked placeholder text is appropriate, even going so far as to call for the death of Lorem Ipsum. I think it depends what you're trying to accomplish. I once noted that it's better to use real content to avoid Blank Page Syndrome, for example.

There are quite a few websites that helpfully offer up the classic Lorem Ipsum text in various eminently copy-and-pastable forms.

Classic Lorem Ipsum

• The original site
• With bold, tags, lists, quotes, code blocks, etc
• With many HTML structure variants on a single page
• With choice of paras, words, sentences
• With download and gibberish options
• With non-repeating text and diacriticals/punctuation added
• With short/long paras and lists
• With English, tags, headings, bold and italic
• WordPress standard content oriented

Beyond that, if you just want a bunch of, uh, interesting text to fill an area, there a lot – and I mean a lot – of websites to choose from. So many in fact that I was a little overwhelmed trying to index them all. I've tried to broadly categorize the ones I did find, below. If you know of more, feel free to leave a comment and I'll update the list.

This is a lot to go through. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd say Fillerati because it's all dignified and stuff. But I think truer to the spirit of Lorem Ipsum are definitely the homophonic transformations, which consistently blow my mind every time I attempt to read them. Isn't that the implied goal of any properly greeked text? You were one deliciously perverse professor of romance languages, Howard L. Chace.

In today's Pinteresting world, images are arguably more important than text. But what is the Lorem Ipsum of images? Is there even one? I guess you could just slap some Lorem Ipsum text in an image, but where is the fun in that? Anyway, there are also plenty of websites offering up placeholder images of various types to go along with your Lorum Ipsum placeholder text.

Images

• Creative Commons images
• Flickr
• Kittens
• Dogs
• Bears
• Plain blocks of specific sizes, colors, text
• More plain blocks of specific sizes, colors, text
• Gray boxes
• More gray boxes
• Gray boxes on App Engine
• Local JavaScript generated gray boxes

I'm not sure the world needs any more Lorem Ipsum-alikes than we already have at this point. Like the market for ironic t-shirts, the Internet has ensured that our placeholder greeked text needs have not merely been met but vastly exceeded for the forseeable future. But after discovering all the creative things people have done with Lorem Ipsum, and text placeholders in general, it's sure tempting to dream yet another one up, isn't it?

Posted on the 19th of May at about 3PM.

My father had a thing for outlining, and he was lucky because he had a son who learned how to program, and made outlining work on a computer.

The great thing about outlining is that you can reorganize. That's the purpose of outlining. You can't do it on paper. That's why people invented index cards. But they are one-level outlines. Not nearly as useful as the multi-level reorganizable outlines on a computer. Outlining works on a computer much better than it does on paper.

My father taught marketing to MBA students at Baruch College and then Pace University in NYC. Once we had outlining they learned how to plan their marketing campaigns with his son's outliner. His colleagues thought he was obsessing over his son, but I know my father. It wouldn't have occurred to him. It was the other way around. The outliner showed him that there were qualities to his son that he hadn't discovered. He loved outlines so much eventually he would say "Every day is Father's Day." It embarassed me at the time, but now it doesn't, it makes me feel his approval, which like it or not, is something every son wants from his father.

I, of course, used outlines too, but until recently, not in the way my father did. I used my outliners for two things -- one big and one not so big. The big thing is writing code and organizing the data the code operates on. Frontier, the programming environment I started creating in grad school, and completed in the early 90s, was entirely built around outlining. It wasn't in any way an afterthought. The assumption was that you had a tool that could manipulate hierarchy. For me, outlining and programming are inseperable. I've been programming in this environment for most of my adult life. Since 1989. 2012 - 1989 = 23 years. Unless Python or Javascript get all this, I doubt if I can work in any other environment. I'd be open to bringing those languages in.

Anyway, the second way, which until recently hasn't been a big deal for me, is organizing my work. People who worked for me would use MORE and ThinkTank that way. Especially the people whose jobs it was to ship products. My customers used the products that way, but until recently I didn't.

What precipitated the change, believe it or not, is Jeremy Lin.

James Burke did a great thing with his Connections series. He showed how what appears to be an insignificant coincidence turns out to create the serendipity needed for an idea to pop out of someone's mind. For me, it's been the endless hours I've spent watching basketball this year. At some point, while watching a game, I realized I could open my laptop and jot down an idea instead of using a reporter's notebook, which I used to buy by the dozen for recording ideas. One jotted idea turned into a plan. So the next day when I'd sit down to do my programming work, there would be the plan, ready to go. I didn't have to think about what comes next. That made it possible for me to work much more quickly. This is something you learn better as you grow older. There's value in stepping back and getting organized before taking on the next big task.

I suspect my father knew this. I think it would answer the questions he'd ask me about why I don't work harder to explain to people why outliners are so revolutionary. I couldn't explain it for the simple reason that I didn't know.

Outlining for me has always been an intuitive thing, and hard to verbalize. I saw hierarchies everywhere in computers. To me, it made sense to invest in that. If you were going to spend so much time dealing with hierarchy, why not put in a special effort to unify them. To make it so you always had a great tool for managing them, instead of a dozen so-so tools. To this day I don't understand why there isn't a generic reusable outliner baked into modern operating systems. There should be.

So now I'm on the cusp of releasing a tool that allows you to write directly onto the web in an outliner. The distance between the content on your machine and it being on the web is one mouse-click. That's exactly how far you want it to be. My father is not alive to see this, but if he were, he'd probably die from excitement. This is something he and I shared, at a genetic level, in our DNA, is this idea that the human mind can reach outside of itself, onto a computer, to make even more powerful and useful intellectual structures. Honestly, I wish he were here to share this with me.

Posted on the 19th of May at about 11AM.

Okay yesterday was Facebook IPO day. How many times did you hear about it. What new information was added each time you heard. Why do we obsess so much about it. Did anything really happen? Blah blah blah. Yadda yadda yadda.

But it does have a real impact on our lives. I realized it yesterday after a meeting, where I ran into a bright dude, a real up and comer. He's smart. Has worked at some prestigious places. He just joined a startup.

He had been asking me questions via email about something I was working on. But I had already written docs that covered the questions he asked. Finally, meeting face to face, he asked the same questions. I asked why he couldn't put a few minutes into reading the docs. Then I realized, before he could answer -- which was good, because he was already gone -- no one is paying attention.

I'm sure he'll read this, which is funny in a way. I don't mean anything personal. This is what bubbles do to us. Even if you're not going to hit the jackpot, all that money floating around still makes it hard to focus on things that take time. Rush. It's a game of musical chairs. The music will stop and you won't have a place to sit. It's all the more dangerous today because the employment situation, outside the bubble, is bleak. (Originally I said it's bleak for young people, but it's also true for people my age. No one is offering me any jobs. It's lucky I have savings.)

I don't have any answers. I know it's hard to listen. But I feel these days like we all have our own gigs, and we're fighting for attention, because attention is where the money is, but none of us have any attention to give. Desperate. Flailing. I find myself wishing there were more people I could bounce ideas off, but there isn't much bounce these days.

So I think for most of us, the Facebook IPO is a transition, maybe to something better. A peak. It sure isn't making us rich. And it's not giving us much to hope either.

Posted on the 18th of May at about 1PM.

It's become a running joke on Twitter that when I post an item to my Radio2 feed with this title, I get ten times the response that I get from a normal post. Not sure what it means. But no harm.

I don't usuallly run test posts on Scripting News, because the software here isn't really moving. But today I'm working on one of the connections between RSS and the worldoutline, and am doing something interesting with blog posts that are really outlines, like the ones on Scripting News.

You don't usually see the hierarchy in the feed, but today, on my worldoutline site, if all goes well -- we will.

So here's a bit of an outline, the classic States outline

Far West

Great Plains

Mid-Atlantic

Midwest

Mountains

New England

South

Southwest

If this works, when we view this over in the worldoutline, the hierarchy should show up, as an expandable outline. As it does on Scripting News. Lots of prayer and knocking on wood. And the usual disclaimers. IANAL. My mother loves me. Etc.

Update: It worked!

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The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012.

A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York. Even if Mr. Bloomberg did "learn to code", with apologies to Adam Vandenberg, I expect we'd end up with this:

10 PRINT "I AM MAYOR"
20 GOTO 10

Fortunately, the odds of this technological flight of fancy happening – even in jest – are zero, and for good reason: the mayor of New York City will hopefully spend his time doing the job taxpayers paid him to do instead. According to the Office of the Mayor home page, that means working on absenteeism programs for schools, public transit improvements, the 2013 city budget, and … do I really need to go on?

To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder? It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job, for that matter. But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can't see it.

Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing. That'd be ridiculous, right?

The "everyone should learn to code" movement isn't just wrong because it falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math. I wish. It is wrong in so many other ways.

• It assumes that more code in the world is an inherently desirable thing. In my thirty year career as a programmer, I have found this … not to be the case. Should you learn to write code? No, I can't get behind that. You should be learning to write as little code as possible. Ideally none.
  
  
• It assumes that coding is the goal. Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it's not. Their job is to solve problems. Don't celebrate the creation of code, celebrate the creation of solutions. We have way too many coders addicted to doing just one more line of code already.
  
  
• It puts the method before the problem. Before you go rushing out to learn to code, figure out what your problem actually is. Do you even have a problem? Can you explain it to others in a way they can understand? Have you researched the problem, and its possible solutions, deeply? Does coding solve that problem? Are you sure?
  
  
• It assumes that adding naive, novice, not-even-sure-they-like-this-whole-programming-thing coders to the workforce is a net positive for the world. I guess that's true if you consider that one bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. And for that matter, most people who already call themselves programmers can't even code, so please pardon my skepticism of the sentiment that "everyone can learn to code".
  
  
• It implies that there's a thin, easily permeable membrane between learning to program and getting paid to program professionally. Just look at these new programmers who got offered jobs at an average salary of $79k/year after attending a mere two and a half month bootcamp! Maybe you too can teach yourself Perl in 24 hours! While I love that programming is an egalitarian field where degrees and certifications are irrelevant in the face of experience, you still gotta put in your ten thousand hours like the rest of us.

I suppose I can support learning a tiny bit about programming just so you can recognize what code is, and when code might be an appropriate way to approach a problem you have. But I can also recognize plumbing problems when I see them without any particular training in the area. The general populace (and its political leadership) could probably benefit most of all from a basic understanding of how computers, and the Internet, work. Being able to get around on the Internet is becoming a basic life skill, and we should be worried about fixing that first and most of all, before we start jumping all the way into code.

Please don't advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse, because of the fat paychecks. Instead, I humbly suggest that we spend our time learning how to …

• Research voraciously, and understand how the things around us work at a basic level.
• Communicate effectively with other human beings.

These are skills that extend far beyond mere coding and will help you in every aspect of your life.

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Posted on the 7th of May at about 1PM.

Posted on the 7th of May at about 8AM.

Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk about cats, but when I do, I make it count.

We've used automated cat feeders since 2007 with great success. (My apologies for the picture quality, but it was 2007, and camera phones were awful.)

I do not miss the days when the cats would come and sit on our heads at 5 AM, wanting their breakfast.

Me neither. I haven't stopped loving our fuzzy buddies, but this was also before we had onetwothree children. We don't have a lot of time for random cat hijinks these days. Anyway, once we set up the automated feeders in 2007, it was a huge relief to outsource pet food obsessions to machines. They reliably delivered a timed feeding at 8am and 8pm like clockwork for the last five years. No issues whatsoever, other than changing the three D batteries about once a year, filling the hopper with kibble about once a month, and an occasional cleaning.

Although they worked, there were still many details of the automated feeders' design that were downright terrible. I put up with these problems because I was so happy to have automatic feeders that worked at all. So when I noticed that the 2012 version of these feeders appeared to be considerably updated, I went ahead and upgraded immediately on faith alone. After all, it had been nearly five years! Surely the company had improved their product a bit since then … right? Well, a man can dream, can't he?

When I ordered the new feeders, I assumed they would be a little better than what I had before.

The two feeders don't look so radically different, do they? But pay attention to the details.

• The food bowl is removable. It drove me crazy that the food bowl in the old version was permanently attached, and tough to clean as a result.
• The food bowl has rounded interior edges. As if cleaning the non-removable bowl of our old version wasn't annoying enough, it also had sharp interior edges, which tended to accrete a bunch of powdered food gunk in there over time. Very difficult to clean properly.
• The programming buttons are large and easy to press. In the old version, the buttons were small watch-style soft rubber buttons that protruded from the surface. The tactile feedback was terrible, and they were easy to mis-press because of their size and mushiness.
• The programming buttons are directly accessible on the face of the device. For no discernable reason whatsoever, the programming buttons in the old version were under a little plastic clear protective "sneeze guard" flap, which you had to pinch up and unlock with your thumb before you could do any programming at all. I guess the theory was that a pet could somehow accidentally brush against the buttons and do … something … but that seems incredibly unlikely. But most of all, unnecessary.
• The programming is easier. We never changed the actual feed schedule, but just changing the time for daylight savings was so incredibly awkward and contorted we had to summarize the steps from the manual on a separate piece of paper as a "cheat sheet". The new version, in contrast, makes changing the time almost as simple as it should be. Almost.
• There is an outflow cover flap. By far the number one physical flaw of the old feeder: the feed slot invites curious paws, and makes it all too easy to fish out kibble on demand. You can see in my original photo that we had to mod the feed slot to tape (and eventually bolt) a wire soap dish cover over it so the cats wouldn't be able to manual feed. The new feeder has a perfectly aligned outflow flap that I couldn't even dislodge with my finger. And it works; even our curious-est cat wasn't able to get past it.
• The top cover rotates to lock. On the old feeder, the top cover to the clear kibble storage was a simple friction fit; dislodging it wasn't difficult, and the cats did manage to do this early on with some experimentation. On the new feeder, the cover is slotted, and rotates to lock against the kibble storage securely. This is the same way the kibble feeder body locks on the base (on both old and new feeders), so it's logical to use this same "rotate to lock into or out of position" design in both places.
• The feed hopper is funnel shaped. The old feed hopper was a simple cylinder, and holds less in the same space as a result. When I transferred the feed over from the old full models (we had literally just filled them the day before) to the updated ones, I was able to add about 15-20 percent more kibble despite the device being roughly the same size in terms of floor space.
• The base is flared. Stability is critical; depending how adventurous your cats are, they may physically attack the feeders and try to push them over, or hit them hard enough to trigger a trickle of food dispensing. A flared base isn't the final solution, but it's a big step in the right direction. It's a heck of a lot tougher to knock over a feeder with a bigger "foot" on the ground.
• It's off-white. The old feeder, like the Ford Model T, was available in any color customers wanted, so long as it was black. Which meant it did a great job of not blending in with almost any decor, and also showed off its dust collection like a champ. Thank goodness the new model comes in "linen".

These are, to be sure, a bunch of dumb, nitpicky details. Did the old version feed our cats reliably? Yes, it did. But it was also a pain to clean and maintain, a sort of pain that I endured weekly, for reasons that made no sense to me other than arbitrarily poor design choices. But when I bought the new version of the automated feeder, I was shocked to discover that nearly every single problem I had with the previous generation was addressed. I felt as if the Petmate Corporation™ was actually listening to all the feedback from the people who used their product, and actively refined the product to address our complaints and suggestions.

My point, and I do have one, is that details matter. Details matter, in fact, a hell of a lot. Whether in automatic cat feeders, or software. As my friend Wil Shipley once said:

This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.

This is still one of my favorite quotes about software. It's something we internalized heavily when building Stack Overflow. Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate.

Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don't obsess over all those details, if you think it's OK to concentrate on the "important" parts and continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis – you're not creating great software. Someone else is. I hope for your sake they aren't your competitor.

The details are hard. Everyone screws up the details at first, just like Petmate did with the first version of this automatic feeder. And it's OK to screw up the details initially, provided …

• you're getting the primary function more or less right.
• you're listening to feedback from the people who use your product, and actively refining the details of your product based on their feedback every day.

We were maniacal about listening to feedback from avid Stack Overflow users from the earliest days of Stack Overflow in August 2008. Did you know that we didn't even have comments in the first version of Stack Overflow? But it was obvious, based on user feedback and observed usage, that we desperately needed them. There are now, at the time I am writing this, 1,569 completed feature requests; that's more than one per day on average.

Imagine that. Someone who cares about the details just as much as you do.

Posted on the 7th of May at about 1AM.

Posted on the 4th of May at about 10PM.

Posted on the 4th of May at about 4PM.

Posted on the 4th of May at about 5AM.

Posted on the 3rd of May at about 10PM.

Despite popular assertions to the contrary, science tells us that money can buy happiness. To a point.

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience — the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. […] When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000.

For reference, the federal poverty level for a family of four is currently $23,050. Once you reach a little over 3 times the poverty level in income, you've achieved peak happiness, as least far as money alone can reasonably get you.

This is something I've seen echoed in a number of studies. Once you have "enough" money to satisfy the basic items at the foot of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid – that is, you no longer have to worry about food, shelter, security, and perhaps having a bit of extra discretionary money for the unknown – stacking even more money up doesn't do much, if anything, to help you scale the top of the pyramid.

But even if you're fortunate enough to have a good income, how you spend your money has a strong influence on how happy – or unhappy – it will make you. And, again, there's science behind this. The relevant research is summarized in If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right (pdf).

Most people don't know the basic scientific facts about happiness — about what brings it and what sustains it — and so they don't know how to use their money to acquire it. It is not surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about wine end up with cellars that aren't that much better stocked than their neighbors', and it should not be surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about happiness end up with lives that aren't that much happier than anyone else's. Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don't.

You may also recognize some of the authors on this paper, in particular Dan Gilbert, who also wrote the excellent book Stumbling on Happiness that touched on many of the same themes.

What is, then, the science of happiness? I'll summarize the basic eight points as best I can, but read the actual paper (pdf) to obtain the citations and details on the underlying studies underpinning each of these principles.

1. Buy experiences instead of things

Things get old. Things become ordinary. Things stay the same. Things wear out. Things are difficult to share. But experiences are totally unique; they shine like diamonds in your memory, often more brightly every year, and they can be shared forever. Whenever possible, spend money on experiences such as taking your family to Disney World, rather than things like a new television.

2. Help others instead of yourself

Human beings are intensely social animals. Anything we can do with money to create deeper connections with other human beings tends to tighten our social connections and reinforce positive feelings about ourselves and others. Imagine ways you can spend some part of your money to help others – even in a very small way – and integrate that into your regular spending habits.

3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones

Because we adapt so readily to change, the most effective use of your money is to bring frequent change, not just "big bang" changes that you will quickly grow acclimated to. Break up large purchases, when possible, into smaller ones over time so that you can savor the entire experience. When it comes to happiness, frequency is more important than intensity. Embrace the idea that lots of small, pleasurable purchases are actually more effective than a single giant one.

4. Buy less insurance

Humans adapt readily to both positive and negative change. Extended warranties and insurance prey on your impulse for loss aversion, but because we are so adaptable, people experience far less regret than they anticipate when their purchases don't work out. Furthermore, having the easy "out" of insurance or a generous return policy can paradoxically lead to even more angst and unhappiness because people deprived themselves of the emotional benefit of full commitment. Thus, avoid buying insurance, and don't seek out generous return policies.

5. Pay now and consume later

Immediate gratification can lead you to make purchases you can't afford, or may not even truly want. Impulse buying also deprives you of the distance necessary to make reasoned decisions. It eliminates any sense of anticipation, which is a strong source of happiness. For maximum happiness, savor (maybe even prolong!) the uncertainty of deciding whether to buy, what to buy, and the time waiting for the object of your desire to arrive.

6. Think about what you're not thinking about

We tend to gloss over details when considering future purchases, but research shows that our happiness (or unhappiness) largely lies in exactly those tiny details we aren't thinking about. Before making a major purchase, consider the mechanics and logistics of owning this thing, and where your actual time will be spent once you own it. Try to imagine a typical day in your life, in some detail, hour by hour: how will it be affected by this purchase?

7. Beware of comparison shopping

Comparison shopping focuses us on attributes of products that arbitrarily distinguish one product from another, but have nothing to do with how much we'll enjoy the purchase. They emphasize characteristics we care about while shopping, but not necessarily what we'll care about when actually using or consuming what we just bought. In other words, getting a great deal on cheap chocolate for $2 may not matter if it's not pleasurable to eat. Don't get tricked into comparing for the sake of comparison; try to weight only those criteria that actually matter to your enjoyment or the experience.

8. Follow the herd instead of your head

Don't overestimate your ability to independently predict how much you'll enjoy something. We are, scientifically speaking, very bad at this. But if something reliably makes others happy, it's likely to make you happy, too. Weight other people's opinions and user reviews heavily in your purchasing decisions.

Happiness is a lot harder to come by than money. So when you do spend money, keep these eight lessons in mind to maximize whatever happiness it can buy for you. And remember: it's science!

Posted on the 3rd of May at about 7AM.

Posted on the 2nd of May at about 1AM.

We reflexively instruct our children to always tell the truth. It's even encoded into Boy Scout Law. It's what adults do, isn't it? But do we? Isn't telling the truth too much and too often a bad life strategy – perhaps even dangerous? Is telling children to always tell the truth even itself the whole truth?

One of the most thought provoking articles on the topic, and one I keep returning to, year after year, is I Think You're Fat. It's about the Radical Honesty movement, which proposes that adults follow their own advice and always tell the truth. No matter what.

The [Radical Honesty] movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough – a world without fibs – but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path to authentic relationships. It's the only way to smash through modernity's soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.

And yet … maybe there's something to it. Especially for me. I have a lying problem. Mine aren't big lies. They aren't lies like "I cannot recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator." Mine are little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell dozens of them every day. "Yes, let's definitely get together soon." "I'd love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu." "No, we can't buy a toy today – the toy store is closed." It's bad. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.

The author, A.J. Jacobs, is a great writer who has made something of a cottage industry of treating himself like a guinea pig, such as attempting to become the smartest man in the world, spend a year living exactly like the Bible tells us to, and to become the fittest person on Earth. Based on the strength of this article, I bought two of his books; experiments like Radical Honesty are right up his alley.

Radical honesty itself isn't exactly a new concept. It's been parodied in any number of screwball Hollywood comedies such as Liar, Liar (1997) and The Invention of Lying (2009). But there's a big difference between milking this concept for laughs and exploring it as an actual lifestyle among real human beings. Among the ideas raised in the article, which you should go read now, are:

• Telling someone that something they created is terrible: is that cruelty, because they have no talent, or is it compassion, so they can know they need to improve it?
• Does a thought in your head that you never express to anyone represent your truth? Should you share it? This is particularly tricky for men, who think about sex twice as much as women.
• How much mental energy do you expend listening to a conversation trying to determine how much of what the other person is saying is untrue? Wouldn't it be less fatiguing if everything they said was, by definition, the truth? And when you're talking, always telling the truth means you never have to decide just how much truth to tell, how to hedge, massage, and spin the truth to make it palatable.
• In a hypothetical future when every action we take is public and broadcast to the world, is that exposing the real truth of our lives? Should we become more honest today to ready ourselves for this inevitable future?
• Always telling the truth can be thrilling, a form of risk taking, as you intentionally violate taboos around politeness that exist solely for the sake of avoiding conflict.
• Total honesty can lead to new breakthroughs in communication, where politeness prevented you from ever reaching the root, underlying causes of discontent or unhappiness.
• Honesty is more efficient. Rather than spending a lot of time sending messages back and forth artfully dancing around the truth, go directly there.
• If people see you are willing to be honest with them, they tend to return the favor, leading to a more useful relationship.

What we often don't acknowledge is that the truth is kind of scary. That's why we have a hard time being honest with ourselves, much less those around us. Reading through all these ambiguous situations that A.J. put himself through, you start to wonder if you understand what truth is, or what it means to decide that something is "true". After summarizing the article in bullet form, I'm surprised there are so many points in favor of honesty, maybe even radical honesty.

But uncompromisingly committing to the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, has a darker side.

My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then forget to come back.

"Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?" she asks.

"Well...is there a payoff?"

"F**k you."

It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? "Ninety percent of the time I love my wife," I told him. "And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?"

Blanton's response: "Because you're a manipulative, lying son of a bitch."

Rather than embrace the truth, as Radical Honesty would have us do, Adrian Tan advises us to be wary of the truth.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

I think he's right. But Radical Honesty isn't altogether wrong, either. Let me be clear: Radical Honesty, as a lifestyle, is ridiculous and insane. Advocating telling the truth 100% of the time, no matter what, is harmful extremism. But it's also wonderfully seductive as a concept, because it illustrates how needlessly afraid most of us are of truth – even truths that could potentially help us. Radical Honesty teaches us to be more brave. That is, when it's not destroying our lives and the lives of everyone around us.

Ask yourself: what is the purpose of this truth? What effect will sharing this truth have on the other person, on yourself, on the world? What change will come about, positive or negative, from choosing to voice a particular truth at a particular time?

I believe that the true lesson of Radical Honesty is that truth, real truth, is honesty with a purpose. Ideally a noble purpose, but any purpose at all other than "because I could" will suffice. By all means, be brave; embrace the truth. But if your honesty has no purpose, if you can't imagine any positive outcome from this honesty, I suggest you're better off keeping it to yourself.

Or even lying.

Posted on the 30th of April at about 3PM.

Fungus Auricularia auricula-judae

Posted on the 29th of April at about 9AM.

Posted on the 29th of April at about 7AM.

Posted on the 28th of April at about 3PM.

Posted on the 28th of April at about 7AM.

Posted on the 28th of April at about 6AM.

Posted on the 27th of April at about 12PM.

Posted on the 27th of April at about 7AM.

To understand this story, you need to understand that grandchildren are like crack cocaine to grandparents. I'm convinced that if our parents could somehow snort our children up their noses to get a bigger fix, they would. And when your parents live out of state, like ours do, access to the Internet isn't just important. No. It is life threatening.

Like Gator in Jungle Fever, grandparents just gotta get their fix of the grandkids every month. And if they don't, if their Internet is broken for any reason, you're going to get an earful via telegraph and facsimile and registered letter until you fix it.

Either way, they're gonna get high. On your kids.

My mom is no exception. So when her computer suddenly stopped working, and she couldn't get updates on her three grandkids, I got frantic calls. Which is odd, because everything had been working fine for a few years now. Once Henry was born in 2009, I set her up with a netbook that had Skype and Firefox set to auto update and she'd been able to video chat with us regularly, no problem at all, since then. So what happened?

My first thought was to hell with it, I'll just buy her a new iPad online via the Apple Store. I'm a big fan of the retina display, and surely the touchy-feely iPad would be more resistant to whatever problem she was having than a netbook, what with its archaic "operating system" and "updates" and "keyboard" and "mouse".

With some urging from my wife (I married well), cooler heads prevailed. What if her problem had nothing to do with the computer, but her Internet connection in some way? Then I'd just be trading one set of problems for another with the iPad. I have no idea how things are set up over there, thousands of miles away. I needed help. Help from a fellow geek who lives nearby and is willing to drive out and assist my poor mom.

My mom doesn't live near where I grew up any more, so I have no friend network there. All I could think of was Geek Squad. I've seen the trucks in our neighborhood, and they've been around a while, so I checked out their website. Maybe they'd work?

When I can buy my mom a new iPad for $399, the idea of paying $299 just to have someone come out and fix her old stuff starts to feel like a really bad idea. But I suppose it's a preview of our disposable computer future, because it's increasingly cheaper to buy a new one than it is to bother fixing the old one. This is the stuff that my friend and iFixit founder Kyle Wiens' nightmares are made of. I'm sorry, Kyle. But it's coming.

I posted my discontent on Twitter, as I am wont to do, and received an interesting recommendation for a site I'd never heard of – Geekatoo.

I was intrigued, first because the site didn't appear to suck which is more than I can say for about half the links I click on, and second because it appealed to my geek instincts. I could post a plea for help for my mom, and a fellow geek, one of my kind who happened to be local, would be willing to head out and assist. I could send out the geek bat-signal! But I was still skeptical. My mom lives in Charlotte, North Carolina which, while not exactly the sticks, isn't necessarily a big tech hub city, either. I figured I had nothing to lose at this point, so I posted the request titled "Mom Needs Tech Support" with the info I had.

Much to my surprise, I got two great bids within 24 hours, geeks with good credentials, and I picked the first one. The estimate was two hours for $45, and he was on-site helping my mom within 2 days from the time I posted.

It turns out that my wife's intuition was correct: the cable internet installer had inexplicably decided to connect my mother's computer to a neighbor's wireless, instead of setting up a WiFi access point for her. So when that neighbor moved away, calamity ensued.

And the results? Well, I think they speak for themselves.

My mom, as usual, exaggerates about her only son. I am far, far from the best son ever. But any website that can make me look like a hero to my mom, and keep my fellow Super User geeks gainfully employed doing superhero work on my behalf gets a huge thumbs up from me.

Needless to say, strongly recommended. If you need reliable local tech support that won't break the bank, and you want to support both your family and your local geek community at the same time, check out Geekatoo.

Posted on the 27th of April at about 6AM.

Posted on the 24th of April at about 4AM.

Posted on the 23rd of April at about 10PM.

I've been an eBay user since 1999, and I still frequent eBay as both buyer and seller. In that time, eBay has transformed from a place where geeks sell broken laser pointers to each other, into a global marketplace where businesses sell anything and everything to customers. If you're looking for strange or obscure items, things almost nobody sells new any more, or grey market items for cheap, eBay is still not a bad place to look.

At least for me, eBay still basically works, after all these years. But one thing hasn't changed: the eBay website has always been difficult to use and navigate. They've updated the website recently to remove some of the more egregious cruft, but it's still way too complicated. I guess I had kind of accepted old, complex websites as the status quo, because I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I compared the experience on the eBay website with the experience of the eBay apps for mobile and tablet.

eBay Website

eBay Mobile App

eBay Tablet App

Unless you're some kind of super advanced eBay user, you should probably avoid the website. The tablet and mobile eBay apps are just plain simpler, easier, and faster to use than the eBay website itself. I know this intuitively from using eBay on my devices and computers, but there's also usability studies with data to prove it, too. To be fair, eBay is struggling under the massive accumulated design debt of a website originally conceived in the late 90s, whereas their mobile and tablet app experiences are recent inventions. It's not so much that the eBay apps are great, but that the eBay website is so very, very bad.

The implied lesson here is to embrace constraints. Having a limited, fixed palette of UI controls and screen space is a strength. A strength we used to have in early Mac and Windows apps, but seem to have lost somewhere along the way as applications got more powerful and complicated. And it's endemic on the web as well, where the eBay website has been slowly accreting more and more functionality since 1999. The nearly unlimited freedom that you get in a modern web browser to build whatever UI you can dream up, and assume as large or as small a page as you like, often ends up being harmful to users. It certainly is in the case of eBay.

If you're starting from scratch, you should always design the UI first, but now that we have such great mobile and tablet device options, consider designing your site for the devices that have the strictest constraints first, too. This is the thinking that led to mobile first design strategy. It helps you stay focused on a simple and uncluttered UI that you can scale up to bigger and beefier devices. Maybe eBay is just going in the wrong direction here; design simple things that scale up; not complicated things you need to scale down.

Above all else, simplify! But why stop there? If building the mobile and tablet apps first for a web property produces a better user experience – why do we need the website, again? Do great tablet and phone applications make websites obsolete?

Why are apps better than websites?

1. They can be faster.
   No browser overhead of CSS and HTML and JavaScript hacks, just pure native UI elements retrieving precisely the data they need to display what the user requests.
   
   
2. They use simple, native UI controls.
   Rather than imagineering whatever UI designers and programmers can dream up, why not pick from a well understood palette of built-in UI controls on that tablet or phone, all built for optimal utility and affordance on that particular device?
   
   
3. They make better use of screen space.
   Because designers have to fit just the important things on 4 inch diagonal mobile screens, or 10 inch diagonal tablet screens, they're less likely to fill the display up with a bunch of irrelevant noise or design flourishes (or, uh, advertisements). Just the important stuff, thanks!
   
   
4. They work better on the go and even offline.
   In a mobile world, you can't assume that the user has a super fast, totally reliable Internet connection. So you learn to design apps that download just the data they need at the time they need to display it, and have sane strategies for loading partial content and images as they arrive. That's assuming they arrive at all. You probably also build in some sort of offline mode, too, when you're on the go and you don't have connectivity.

Why are websites better than apps?

1. They work on any device with a browser.
   Websites are as close to universal as we may ever get in the world of software. Provided you have a HTML5 compliant browser, you can run an entire universe of "apps" on your device from day zero, just by visiting a link, exactly the same way everyone has on the Internet since 1995. You don't have to hope and pray a development community emerges and is willing to build whatever app your users need.
   
   
2. They don't have to be installed.
   Applications, unlike websites, can't be visited. They aren't indexed by Google. Nor do applications magically appear on your device; they must be explicitly installed. Even if installation is a one-click affair, your users will have to discover the app before they can even begin to install it. And once installed, they'll have to manage all those applications like so many Pokemon.
   
   
3. They don't have to be updated.
   Websites are always on the infinite version. But once you have an application installed on your device, how do you update it to add features or fix bugs? How do users even know if your app is out of date or needs updating? And why should they need to care in the first place?
   
   
4. They offer a common experience.
   If your app and the website behave radically differently, you're forcing users to learn two different interfaces. How many different devices and apps do you plan to build, and how consistent will they be? You now have a community divided among many different experiences, fragmenting your user base. But with a website that has a decent mobile experience baked in, you can deliver a consistent, and hopefully consistently great, experience across all devices to all your users.

I don't think there's a clear winner, only pros and cons. But apps will always need websites, if for nothing else other than a source of data, as a mothership to phone home to, and a place to host the application downloads for various devices.

And if you're obliged to build a website, why not build it out so it offers a reasonable experience on a mobile or tablet web browser, too? I have nothing against a premium experience optimized to a particular device, but shouldn't all your users have a premium experience? eBay's problem here isn't mobile or tablets per se, but that they've let their core web experience atrophy so badly. I understand that there's a lot of inertia around legacy eBay tools and long time users, so it's easy for me to propose radical changes to the website here on the outside. Maybe the only way eBay can redesign at all is on new platforms.

Will mobile and tablet apps kill websites? A few, certainly. But only the websites stupid enough to let them.

Posted on the 22nd of April at about 1PM.

Posted on the 22nd of April at about 12PM.

Posted on the 20th of April at about 7PM.

Posted on the 17th of April at about 11PM.

It's only a matter of time until your email gets hacked. Don't believe me? Just read this harrowing cautionary tale.

When [my wife] came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up and looking at e‑mail, and we both quickly saw what the real problem was. In my inbox I found a message purporting to be from her, followed by a quickly proliferating stream of concerned responses from friends and acquaintances, all about the fact that she had been “mugged in Madrid.” The account had seemed sluggish earlier that morning because my wife had tried to use it at just the moment a hacker was taking it over and changing its settings—including the password, so that she couldn’t log in again.

…

The greatest practical fear for my wife and me was that, even if she eventually managed to retrieve her records, so much of our personal and financial data would be in someone else’s presumably hostile hands that we would spend our remaining years looking over our shoulders, wondering how and when something would be put to damaging use. At some point over the past six years, our [email] correspondence would certainly have included every number or code that was important to us – credit card numbers, bank-account information, medical info, and any other sensitive data you can imagine.

Now get everyone you know to read it, too. Please. It's for their own good.

Your email is the skeleton key to your online identity. When you lose control of your email to a hacker – not if, but when you lose control of your email to a hacker – the situation is dire. Email is a one stop shop for online identity theft. You should start thinking of security for your email as roughly equivalent to the sort of security you'd want on your bank account. It's exceedingly close to that in practice.

The good news, at least if you use GMail, is that you can make your email virtually hacker-proof today, provided you own a cell phone. The fancy geek technical term for this is two factor authentication, but that doesn't matter right now. What matters is that until you turn this on, your email is vulnerable. So let's get started. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Right. Freaking. Now.

Go to your Google Account Settings

Make sure you're logged in. Expand the little drop-down user info panel at the top right of most Google pages. From here, click "Account" to view your account settings.

On the account settings page, click "edit" next to 2-step verification and turn it on.

Have Your Cell Phone Ready

GMail will walk you through the next few steps. You just need a telephone that can receive SMS text messages. Enter the numeric code sent through the text message to proceed.

Now Log In With Your Password and a PIN

Now your password alone is no longer enough to access your email.

Once this is enabled, accessing your email always requires the password, and a code delivered via your cell phone. (You can check the "remember me for 30 days on this device" checkbox so you don't have to do this every time.) With this in place, even if they discover your super sekrit email password, would-be hackers can't do anything useful with it! To access your email, they'd need to somehow gain control of your cell phone, too. I can't see that happening unless you're in some sort of hostage situation, and at that point I think email security is the least of your problems.

What If I Lose My Cell Phone?

Your cell phone isn't the only way to get the secondary PIN you need to access your email. On the account page there are multiple ways to generate verification codes, including adding a secondary backup phone number, and downloading mobile applications that can generate verification codes without a text message (but that requires a smart phone, naturally).

What About Apps That Access Email?

Applications or websites that access your email, and thus necessarily store your email address and password, are also affected. They have no idea that they now need to enter a PIN, too, so they'll all be broken. You'll need to generate app-specific passwords for your email. To do that, visit the accounts page.

Click on authorizing applications & sites, then enter a name for the application and click the Generate Password button.

Let me be clear about this, because it can be confusing: enter that specially generated password in the application, not your master email password.

This effectively creates a list of passwords specific to each application. So you can see the date each one was last used, and revoke each app's permission to touch your email individually as necessary without ever revealing your primary email password to any application, ever. See, I told you, there is a method to the apparent madness.

But I Don't Use Gmail

Either nag your email provider to provide two-factor authentication, or switch over. Email security is critically important these days, and switching is easy(ish). GMail has had fully secure connections for quite a while now, and once you add two-factor authentication to the mix, that's about as much online email safety as you can reasonably hope to achieve short of going back to snail mail.

Hey, This Sounds Like a Pain!

I know what you're thinking. Yes, this is a pain in the ass. I'll fully acknowledge that. But you know what's an even bigger pain in the ass? Having your entire online identity stolen and trashed by a hacker who happens to obtain your email password one day. Remember that article I exhorted you to read at the beginning? Oh, you didn't read it? Go freaking read it now!

Permit me to channel Jamie Zawinski one last time: "OMG, entering these email codes on every device I access email would be a lot of work! That sounds like a hassle!" Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.

I've been living with this scheme for a few months now, and I've convinced my wife to as well. I won't lie to you; it hasn't all been wine and roses for us either. But it is inconvenient in the same way that bank vaults and door locks are. The upside is that once you enable this, your email becomes extremely secure, to the point that you can (and I regularly do) email yourself highly sensitive data like passwords and logins to other sites you visit so you can easily retrieve them later.

If you choose not to do this, well, at least you've educated yourself about the risks. And I hope you're extremely careful with your email password and change it regularly to something complex. You're making life all too easy for the hackers who make a fabulous living from stealing and permanently defacing online identities just like yours.

Posted on the 16th of April at about 8PM.

In the calculus of communication, writing coherent paragraphs that your fellow human beings can comprehend and understand is far more difficult than tapping out a few lines of software code that the interpreter or compiler won't barf on.

That's why, when it comes to code, all the documentation probably sucks. And because writing for people is way harder than writing for machines, the documentation will continue to suck for the forseeable future. There's very little you can do about it.

Except for one thing.

You can learn to read the source, Luke.

The transformative power of "source always included" in JavaScript is a major reason why I coined – and continue to believe in – Atwood's Law. Even if "view source" isn't built in (but it totally should be), you should demand access to the underlying source code for your stack. No matter what the documentation says, the source code is the ultimate truth, the best and most definitive and up-to-date documentation you're likely to find. This will be true forever, so the sooner you come to terms with this, the better off you'll be as a software developer.

I had a whole entry I was going to write about this, and then I discovered Brandon Bloom's brilliant post on the topic at Hacker News. Read closely, because he explains the virtue of reading source, and in what context you need to read the source, far better than I could:

I started working with Microsoft platforms professionally at age 15 or so. I worked for Microsoft as a software developer doing integration work on Visual Studio. More than ten years after I first wrote a line of Visual Basic, I wish I could never link against a closed library ever again.

Using software is different than building software. When you're using most software for its primary function, it's a well worn path. Others have encountered the problems and enough people have spoken up to prompt the core contributors to correct the issue. But when you're building software, you're doing something new. And there are so many ways to do it, you'll encounter unused bits, rusty corners, and unfinished experimental code paths. You'll encounter edge cases that have been known to be broken, but were worked around.

Sometimes, the documentation isn't complete. Sometimes, it's wrong. The source code never lies. For an experienced developer, reading the source can often be faster… especially if you're already familiar with the package's architecture. I'm in a medium-sized co-working space with several startups. A lot of the other CTOs and engineers come to our team for guidance and advice on occasion. When people report a problem with their stack, the first question I ask them is: "Well, did you read the source code?"

I encourage developers to git clone anything and everything they depend on. Initially, they are all afraid. "That project is too big, I'll never find it!" or "I'm not smart enough to understand it" or "That code is so ugly! I can't stand to look at it". But you don't have to search the whole thing, you just need to follow the trail. And if you can't understand the platform below you, how can you understand your own software? And most of the time, what inexperienced developers consider beautiful is superficial, and what they consider ugly, is battle-hardened production-ready code from master hackers. Now, a year or two later, I've had a couple of developers come up to me and thank me for forcing them to sink or swim in other people's code bases. They are better at their craft and they wonder how they ever got anything done without the source code in the past.

When you run a business, if your software has a bug, your customers don't care if it is your fault or Linus' or some random Rails developer's. They care that your software is bugged. Everyone's software becomes my software because all of their bugs are my bugs. When something goes wrong, you need to seek out what is broken, and you need to fix it. You fix it at the right spot in the stack to minimize risks, maintenance costs, and turnaround time. Sometimes, a quick workaround is best. Other times, you'll need to recompile your compiler. Often, you can ask someone else to fix it upstream, but just as often, you'll need to fix it yourself.

• Closed-software shops have two choices: beg for generosity, or work around it.
• Open source shops with weaker developers tend to act the same as closed-software shops.
• Older shops tend to slowly build the muscles required to maintain their own forks and patches and whatnot.

True hackers have come to terms with a simple fact: If it runs on my machine, it's my software. I'm responsible for it. I must understand it. Building from source is the rule and not an exception. I must control my environment and I must control my dependencies.

Nobody reads other people's code for fun. Hell, I don't even like reading my own code. The idea that you'd settle down in a deep leather chair with your smoking jacket and a snifter of brandy for a fine evening of reading through someone else's code is absurd.

But we need access to the source code. We must read other people's code because we have to understand it to get things done. So don't be afraid to read the source, Luke – and follow it wherever it takes you, no matter how scary looking that code is.

Posted on the 15th of April at about 4PM.

Avocets

A mound for nesting birds

Posted on the 11th of April at about 12PM.

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Posted on the 10th of April at about 9PM.

I adore words, but let's face it: books suck.

More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways:

• They are heavy.
• They take up too much space.
• They have to be printed.
• They have to be carried in inventory.
• They have to be shipped in trucks and planes.
• They aren't always available at a library.
• They may have to be purchased at a bookstore.
• They are difficult to find.
• They are difficult to search within.
• They can go out of print entirely.
• They are too expensive.
• They are not interactive.
• They cannot be updated for errors and addendums.
• They are often copyrighted.

What's the point of a bookshelf full of books other than as an antiquated trophy case of written ideas trapped in awkward, temporary physical relics?

Books should not be celebrated. Words, ideas, and concepts should be celebrated. Books were necessary to store these things, simply because we didn't have any other viable form to contain them. But now we do.

Words Belong on the Internet

At the risk of stating the obvious, if your goal is to get a written idea in front of as many human beings as efficiently as possible, you shouldn't be publishing dead tree books at all. You should be editing a wiki, writing a blog, or creating a website. That's why the Encyclopedia Britannica officially went out of print in 2012, after a 244 year print run. In the straight-up match between paper and Web, the Encyclopedia Britannica lost. Big time.

The EB couldn’t cover enough: 65,000 topics compared to the almost 4M in the English version of Wikipedia.

Topics had to be consistently shrunk or discarded to make room for new information. E.g., the 1911 entry on Oliver Goldsmith was written by no less than Thomas Macaulay, but with each edition, it got shorter and shorter. EB was thus in the business of throwing out knowledge as much as it was in the business of adding knowledge.

Topics were confined to rectangles of text. This is of course often a helpful way of dividing up the world, but it is also essentially false. The “see also’s” and the attempts at synthetic indexes and outlines (Propædi) helped, but they were still highly limited, and cumbersome to use.

This is why the book scanning efforts of Google Books and The Internet Archive are so important – to unlock the knowledge trapped in all those books and place it online so the entire world can benefit.

In the never-ending human quest for communication, bits have won decisively over atoms. But bits haven't completely replaced atoms for publishing quite yet; that will take a few more decades.

An Argument for the eBook

While the Internet is perfectly adequate for basic printed text juxtaposed with images and tables, it is a far cry from the beautiful, complex layout and typography of modern books. Sometimes the medium is part of the message. That's what led computer scientists to create PostScript and TeX, systems of representing the printed page in code as pure mathematics that can scale infinitely, or at least to the best possible resolution of the particular device you're viewing it on. Packaging written content into a special file format preserves these beautiful layouts so you can read the text as originally designed by the author.

It's also fair to argue that writers should be fairly compensated for their work. Clearly nobody is going to pay 5 cents per web page. But there's a long established commercial model of packaging a set of writing together into a coherent format, or "book", and selling that.

You can't always rely on the Internet being available. What if you have no Internet connectivity, or intermittent connectivity? You could periodically harvest a bunch of related web pages every month and package the current versions into a file. And that file can be stored and cached locally on laptops, phones, and servers all over the world. Local files have built in, persistent offline availability.

No, the Internet will not kill the book. But it will change their form permanently; books are no longer pages printed with atoms, they're files printed with bits: eBooks.

The Trouble with Bits

The road from atoms to bits is not an easy one, and we're only at the beginning of this journey. eBooks are vastly more flexible than printed books, but they come with their own set of tradeoffs:

• They always require a reading device.
• They cannot be loaned to friends.
• They cannot be resold to others.
• They cannot be donated to libraries.
• They may be encumbered with copy protection.
• They may be in a format your reader cannot understand.
• They may refuse to load for any reason the publisher deems necessary.
• They may have incomplete or broken or obsolete layout.
• They may have low-resolution bitmapped images that are inferior to print.
• They may be a substantially worse reading experience than print except on very high resolution reading devices.

The copy protection issue alone is deeply troubling; with eBooks, book publishers now have an unprecedented level of control over when, where, and how you can read their books. In the world of atoms, once the book is shipped out, the publisher cedes all control to the reader. Once you've bought that physical book, you can do with it whatever you will: read it, burn it, photocopy it (for personal use), share it, resell it, loan it, donate it, even throw it at passers-by as a makeshift weapon. But in the world of bits, the publisher has an iron grip over their eBook, which isn't so much sold to you as "licensed" for your use, maybe even only for specific devices like an Amazon Kindle or an Apple iPad. And they can silently remove the book from your device at their whim.

In the brave new world of eBooks, book publishers are waking up drunk with newfound power. And honestly I can't say I blame them. After centuries of publishers having virtually no control at all over the books they publish, they've now been granted near total control.

How Much Do eBooks Cost?

Consider one of my favorite books, the classic Don't Make Me Think. How much does it cost to buy, as an eBook or otherwise?

Except for Amazon, all the eBooks are more expensive than the print version. This … makes no sense. How can the bits in the digital version, which require no printing, no shipping, no physical storage whatsoever, be more expensive than the atoms?

What Do eBooks Look Like?

What you actually end up reading when you buy the eBook can vary wildly. Here are pages 80 and 81 of my print copy of Don't Make Me Think. I attempted to take a photograph of the book, then realized it's incredibly difficult to take a decent picture of two pages of a book for a photography noob like myself, so I manually scanned the pages in instead.

If you buy the eBook from the publisher, you get a PDF which appears to be based on the exact same data used to print the book. Pages 80 and 81 are nearly identical to print, with page numbers, footnotes, layout and typography completely intact. (There are some unrelated minor differences on page 81 because the print version is from the second edition.)

But when you buy the eBook from Amazon, you get a proprietary eBook format which contains very little of the original formatting. Pages 80 and 81 are quite different. The footnotes are gone. The title font and font colors are lost. The layout and spacing is completely off, and to my eye the page frankly looks a little broken.

When you buy the book from Apple, you get yet another proprietary eBook format. For comparison, here's page 3 of Don't Make Me Think from the publisher's PDF, which as we've previously established is very nearly the same as print.

I downloaded the sample chapter of Don't Make Me Think from Apple's iBooks, and it appears to be an even worse representation than Amazon's. I have all the same criticisms of Amazon's eBook format here – page 3 has broken layout, no footnotes, missing title fonts and colors, plus now it takes four, yes, four pages to read that very same single print page.

So eBooks Suck, Too?

With Don't Make Me Think, I intentionally chose a book that highlights the remaining gap between atoms and bits in books. I've read dozens of other eBooks on Kindle and iPad, and generally the experience is good. For books that are entirely text, with very little layout, the various eBook formats do a great job. This may very well be a majority of books in the world. All eBook formats handle text and basic fonts perfectly fine. But then, so does the Internet. If an eBook can't outperform the Internet at layout, it loses one of the strongest arguments in its favor.

Still, there's no way Amazon's or Apple's current eBook versions of Don't Make Me Think are suitable replacements for the print version. Worse, you won't even know what you'll be missing unless you download a sample and compare it with the print version, as I have. That's disappointing, because part of the joy a book brings to the words inside is by expertly packaging those words into a whole experience. If an eBook can't capture the nuance of the layout at least as well as a hoary old PDF does, again, why bother?

We, as readers, are easily giving up as much as we're getting in the transition from books made of atoms to eBooks made of bits. To make it worthwhile, I believe publishers need to do two things:

1. eBooks should be inexpensive. Because I can't loan them (with rare exceptions), because I can't resell them, because I can't buy a cheaper used copy, because I'm only licensed to read them at all on "supported" readers under whatever terms the publishers will allow me to, an eBook simply has less utility and value to me. Right now, eBooks are far less flexible than physical books and therefore a worse value. Yet they are far cheaper to produce and sell for everyone involved. The pricing absolutely has to reflect this. If I can get a used copy of a book for less than the eBook, no sale. If I can get a new copy of a book for less than the eBook, no sale and screw you.
   
   
2. eBooks should be a near-perfect replica of the print book. With the advent of the iPad 3, it is finally possible for eBook readers to provide nearly the same visual fidelity as the print book. I don't want to spend money on an eBook with broken, inferior formatting and typography and layout compared to the print edition. Give me an eBook that I can potentially hand down to my children with the same confidence I could give them a print book, 30 years from now, and know that I am not totally compromising the experience.

Because I love words, I want to love eBooks. I want to buy lots and lots of eBooks. But unless the publishers are willing to treat eBooks with the same respect and care that they give to their printed books – and most importantly of all, adjust their pricing to reflect the brave new economy of bits, and not an antiquated economy of atoms – they're destined to eventually suffer the same fate as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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It's been a long time since we announced that we were developing a new editor for ScribTeX. We've had plenty of false starts, changes of plan and last minute realisations, but I'm pleased to announce that as of today we are starting to roll it out to a limited number of users to beta test. If all goes well, we'll keep expanding who it is available to until everyone can use it.

Pictures can say far more than words, so here are a few screenshots:

See the full gallery on Posterous

If you'd like to get early access and help us with feedback and bug hunting, please let us know. Tell us your ScribTeX username either in the comments below, or via an email to team@scribtex.com. We'll try our best to let everyone use it as quickly as possible.

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Everyone wants a professional looking CV and there are no shortage of LaTeX templates that will give you one. If you're like me though you'll want to own your CV and make it your own. That means you need to be able to customise the look and feel yourself which can be notoriously difficult in LaTeX. In this series of blog posts I hope to guide you through creating your own custom class file and show you that it can be easy to format your CV exactly how you want. We'll focus on a CV style but the methods will be identical for any sort of document.

What is a class file?

When you write \documentclass{article} in your LaTeX file, you are including the class file article.cls. This defines all the commands like \section and \title which go into structuring your document. It also configures how these commands affect the format and layout of the page.

Setting up your own class file

The neatest way to customise the format of a document is to keep all that information in a personal class file. This keeps the structure of your document cleanly separated from the formatting and allows for easy reuse. It's easy to set this up so create a document called cv.tex with the following content:

This is trying to load your custom class file my_cv.cls, which doesn't exist yet. Create my_cv.cls in the same directory as cv.tex and write the following line in it:

If you compile your document now you should see the headers in the default article style.

So what has happened here? Class files need to contain a lot of formatting information and internal setup to make LaTeX work properly, but we don't want to have to enter it all manually. Instead we can base our new class file on article.cls. We use \LoadClass to include article.cls and load all of the commands and styles defined in it. Note that we don't use the usual \documentclass command to include article.cls because \documentclass should only ever be called once at the very beginning of your LaTeX document.

Telling LaTeX about your class

All class files should start with two lines similar to the following, which you should add in at the top of my_cv.cls now:

The \NeedsTeXFormat commands tells the compiler which version of LaTeX the package is for. The current version of LaTeX is LaTeX2e and almost all distributions use this.

The \ProvidesClass command gives the compiler some information about your package. The first argument should match the filename of your class file and tells LaTeX what your package is called. The second argument is optional and provides a description of your class which will appear in the log and other places. The description must begin with a date in exactly the format above and it should be the date the package was last modified. This can be used when including the class to check that you have a recent enough version of it. For example if you include it via \documentclass{my_cv}[2012/01/01] with a date which is newer than the date in the class description then a warning will be shown saying that the class is outdated.

Modifying the section headers

The standard article section headings don't really suit a CV so we'd like to replace them with something neater. To do this, we can redefine the \section command to output a custom header. 

Fortunately there is already an excellent package called titlesec which provides an easy way to to customise our header styles. Include this in your class file with

Notice that we should use \RequirePackage rather than the usual \usepackage command because we are in a class file. The \RequirePackage command makes sure that each package is only loaded once, even if called multiple times from different style and class files.

The titlesec package provides the command \titleformat which lets us customise our section headings. Add the following at the end of my_cv.cls to customise the format of the heading:

If we compile cv.tex now we will see that we have some main headers more appropriate for a CV:

We can customise the \subsection headers as well:

The sub-sections are now in the same style:

You should try out some of the formatting options available to see what you like:

• \bf, \it - make the heading bold or italic,
• \scshape - small capitals,
• \small, \normalsize, \large, \Large, \LARGE, \huge, \Huge - set the font size,
• \rmfamily, \sffamily, \ttfamily - set the font type to serifed, san serifed or typewriter respectively.

Adding dates to section headers

We can define some new commands which let us include dates in our section headings. Include the following in your class file:

This defines two new commands \datedsection and \datedsubsection which take two arguments: the section name as before, and a date which will be typeset on the right hand side of the page. The \hfill command tells LaTeX to fill as much space as possible and so pushes the second argument (#2) to the right of the page. Modify cv.tex to use these commands:

Our CV now contains dates:

Conclusions

That's all for part one of this guide, but hopefully I've covered enough for you to go away and start making useful class files. It hasn't taken many commands to create what already looks like a reasonable CV template and we've only scratched the surface of what else we could customise. In the next few parts of this guide I will talk about passing options to your class to configure it, creating a nice title and how to set some general layout options.

Thanks for reading!

(I am relatively new to creating class files myself, so if anyone can point out better ways to do the things I have mentioned here, please let me know.)

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Posted on the 22nd of March at about 9AM.

A few users have been experiencing problems compiling large documents, but thanks to a new compling interface and some backend infrastucture changes these documents shouldn't pose any problems now. For most users this will be a minor user interface update, although the mobile view has been significantly improved. These are the first components of the new editor which will be rolled out slowly in small chunks like this over the next few months.

Technical Details

Previously when a document was compiled, a request would be sent to the ScribTeX servers which would send a request to the compile server. Both of these connections would be left open while the compile was processed and eventually returned via the ScribTeX server back to your browser. This was fine for small documents, but larger compiles would take long enough that the server would timeout and close its connection. The user would be returned an error, despite the fact that the compile would still succeed after the connection was dropped.

Now the compile happens behind the scenes without needing to keep a connection open. The ScribTeX server sends a request to the compile server and then immediately returns a page to your browser. Your browser will then keep asking the compile server if it is finished and when it has the PDF and log are downloaded. This way nothing will timeout even if the compile takes a long time. 

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Posted on the 17th of March at about 11PM.

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Posted on the 8th of February at about 9AM.

Here are some in-progress screenshots of the new editor I am developing for ScribTeX:

See the full gallery on Posterous

Some of the most important new features are:

• Line numbers
• Better information about where LaTeX errors occured, and the ability to jump to the line
• Open multiple files in tabs
• Based on the Ace editor which is fast and responsive

Please let me know what you think so far and what you are looking for in the ScribTeX editor.

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Posted on the 2nd of February at about 9PM.

Posted on the 1st of February at about 10AM.

ScribTeX is flourishing as an online LaTeX editor and can now become your main collaborative hub with access to your project's git repositories. Git is a powerful version control system which helps to keep two or more copies of a project up to date with each other. With ScribTeX it will make it easy to keep a local copy of your project synchronized with your online files. Git takes care of tracking changes and merging any differences that arise between the copies. Unfortunately git has quite a steep learning curve, but if you are new to it and looking to learn more then the Git Community Book is a great place to start.

To access your project's git repository you must have an SSH key pair set up. This is a secure way of authenticating your computer with the ScribTeX server. If you aren't familiar with SSH keys, the documentation at GitHub provides an excellent guide for setting them up. Most of the guide will apply equally well to ScribTeX and the GitHub specific steps can easily be adapted.

Once you have your SSH keys configured you need to upload your public key to ScribTeX. This can be done through your preferences:

Click on 'Edit Preferences' in the Account details section of your dashboard. From here, click on 'SSH Keys' and you will be prompted to upload your public key. You should give the key a descriptive name such as the computer it corresponds to.

You will now be able to access your projects via git. To find the url for a project, go to its settings page and click on 'Git Access':

You can use git to checkout and maintain your projects offline:

$ git clone git@git.scribtex.com/bob/my-project.git

Make some local changes, commit them to git, and push them back to ScribTeX:

$ git commit -a -m 'Updated my files on my own computer'

$ git push origin master

Enjoy!

Please note that ScribTeX is not a full git hosting solution and has a few restrictions. ScribTeX is very fussy about preserving its history and so you will not be able to rebase or change any commits that already exist on the ScribTeX server. Hopefully this restriction will eventually be lifted, but for now it keeps things sane on the ScribTeX server. You should also note that only the master branch is available for editing via the ScribTeX web interface.

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Posted on the 26th of January at about 2PM.

Posted on the 22nd of January at about 1PM.

I know I'm a bit late, but Happy New year to all the ScribTeX users out there. I hope 2011 is a good year for you. I know this blog sees a lack of regular updates so I've made one of my New Year's resolutions to post regular updates on how ScribTeX is getting on, and what I'm working on to improve it. This time I'm going to talk a bit about how you can now choose between different compilers for each project.

There are three different compilers you can choose for each project: pdflatex, latex, xelatex. These are the programs that convert your .tex files into a nicely formatted pdf document. Previously, ScribTeX only used pdflatex to compile your documents. This is the best choice for the majority of users, but there are certain things that pdflatex can't do which latex and xelatex can.

For example, a big difference is that latex compiles natively to a postscript file but pdflatex compiles directly to a pdf. Some packages like pstricks make use of commands that only make sense to postscript files and so can't be used with pdflatex. If you want to use packages like pstricks you can now use them with the latex compiler instead.

xelatex is a more recent compiler and has better support for modern fonts and Unicode encodings. A lot of the power of XeLaTeX comes from the ability to use almost any font with LaTeX, but ScribTeX only has the standard fonts installed at the moment. If you would like to add some extra ones that you need, please open a support ticket, or drop me an email at team@scribtex.com. Please consider that the font must have an appropriate license for use by ScribTeX though.

To choose the compiler for your project, goto 'Settings' on the project page, and then 'Compiler Settings'. You should see a drop down box where you can choose between pdflatex, latex and xelatex as the default compiler:

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Posted on the 4th of January at about 12PM.

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Posted on the 17th of August at about 10AM.

Posted on the 14th of August at about 4PM.

Posted on the 8th of August at about 4PM.

It will come as a blow to many academics that Google have recently decided to discontinue support for Google Wave, their real-time collaboration and communication tool. When Google originally announced Wave there were many in the academic community who were looking forward to having a platform for a mix of real-time communication and joint editing. With the addition of LaTeX widgets things looked really promising. Sadly, Wave didn't live up to it's promised potential. It did the job, but it didn't become the perfect tool academics were hoping for. None the less, I'm sure it will be missed.

There have been plenty of blog posts dissecting Google's decision and most seem to have reached the same conclusion. Google Wave tried to be all things for all people and instead ended up being confusing and hard to use. Waves are neither document nor chat, and they certainly aren't up to handling large amounts of LaTeX. When you're trying to write a paper or some other document you need an environment that will handle not just snippets of mathematics but the full typesetting power of LaTeX. For this niche use, Wave is little better than a wiki with support for inline equations.

Wave could be useful as a communication tool or, in less generous terms, a glorified instant messenger. It's real-time nature certainly makes this a possibility, but whenever I tried to use it like this I ended up overwriting things I shouldn't have. Sometimes being able to edit anything that has gone before isn't good idea. A conversation has a distinct linear evolution and this needs to be respected if communication is going to be clear.

So Google Wave is on it's way out, but I'm sure that it has pushed us further towards a good solution. There are similar products that are coming out of the woodwork now that Wave won't overshadow them. Hopefully people will take all the things that Google Wave tried to be and separate them into niche products that do their specific job well.

In the case of collaborating on a LaTeX document, I'd like to think ScribTeX has got that one covered.

ScribTeX is far from perfect and I have a hundred and one features I would like to add, but I'm very aware of making sure it doesn't become a tool for all possible uses. If it does, it will stop being focused on the one task it should do well - editing a LaTeX document. ScribTeX will never become a multitool for academics, but I'm sure it kicks Wave's ass at writing papers collaboratively.

I look forward to seeing which other niche uses can be extracted from Wave. The more focused tools there are, the less we need tools like Wave.

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Posted on the 1st of June at about 9AM.

We've added in a few new features over the past couple of weeks:

• Warnings about conflicting edits. If you start to edit a file which someone else is already editing you will see a message at the bottom of the screen telling you about them. They will also see that you have started to edit the file. If you save your changes over someone else's recent edits you will be warned and asked whether you want to overwrite or try to merge the changes. You can work safely knowing you won't undo the work of your collaborators.
• Upload multiple files in a .zip file. Want to upload lots of files to ScribTeX at once? Just zip them up and upload the zip file. ScribTeX will extract all the files to the current directory. Now you can work offline by downloading your project, editing it offline, zipping it back up and uploading it again.
• Icons based on file type. It's a small change but ScribTeX will now show you a different icon based on the file extension of your files. This should make finding the file you want just that little bit easier.

Next on the agenda is a better application for mobile browsers. Lots of users have been asking for improvements aimed at mobile browsers, or a dedicated application. I think we can meet half way and keep everyone happy by creating a web application designed specifically for mobile devices. Using some fancy HTML5 technology it can be made available offline and then resync with your ScribTeX files when you get back online. This technology can also potentially feedback to the main ScribTeX application to improve it. 

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome and encouraged!

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Posted on the 29th of May at about 6AM.

Posted on the 10th of May at about 9PM.

The last week has seen me playing with a lot of new ideas to improve the way you can collaborate with others on ScribTeX. I think this is one of ScribTeX's biggest strengths but there are still a lot of improvements to be made before I'll be happy with it. A few are obvious additions like showing who else is editing a file at a given time and making sure changes can't be overwritten without warning, but even these have subtle implementation issues that will really affect the user experience.

The real challenge, and possibly a make or break feature of the collaborative aspect of ScribTeX is the merging of edits by different people. A warning that someone else has made changes is fine, but it shouldn't be left to you to combine the changes manually. This blog post is partly a brainstorm and partly a request for your feedback on how you would like such conflicts to be handled by ScribTeX.

Real time collaboration and merging

ScribTeX could take the approach of Etherpad et al. and let users work on the same file at the same time. You would be able to see what your friend typed as she typed it (or at least very soon after). ScribTeX wouldn't have to handle any conflicting edits because you would all be working on the same copy at the same time.

I think real time collaboration has its place, but I know it's not something that everyone wants. Sometimes you want to be able to work on your document in peace, without your friend trying to correct your mistakes or overwriting your paragraphs. So maybe this should be a feature that you turn on if you would like to use it?

Server side merging of conflicts

When you save your document after someone else has just saved their own changes to it, it's very bad etiquette for ScribTeX to go overwriting their changes. Instead, you should be presented with a warning that you'd be doing that - then the bad manners fall on you, not us. After taking a quick glance at their changes you would be able to choose whether to overwrite their changes, discard your own, or more probably try to merge the two into something sensible. If you've both been editing different parts then the merge will happen very nicely, but if you've both updated the same sentence then things might get ugly - too ugly for a computer to handle well. This puts us back to square one with the dreaded 'manual merge'.

So, my questions to you are: Do you mind having to merge the occasional change by hand, or is there a better workflow that would solve this problem? Are you in favor of real time collaboration and how would you like to see it implemented?

Your feedback on these things will really help to shape ScribTeX into the tool you want it to be.

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Posted on the 10th of May at about 12PM.

Posted on the 26th of April at about 9PM.

Ever find yourself without the document you want to work on? Left it on another computer or forgotten to email yourself the changes? What if your document’s written in LaTeX and you need the right software wherever you work? Or your collaborators don't have LaTeX installed and want to get started quickly?

ScribTeX is the answer - an online editor with a full LaTeX environment. It has all the flexibility of LaTeX with all the functionality of an online editor. Documents can contain multiple tex files, bibliographies and a variety of media, so you can enjoy everything you'd expect from LaTeX. ScribTeX faithfully reproduces the offline LaTeX experience, so whether you’re starting a new document or uploading existing files you can get going straight away.

ScribTeX simplifies collaboration. With just a few clicks, you can share your documents with others and ensure you’re all editing the up-to-date version. All changes are recorded by ScribTeX so you can easily see who modified what, and because any edit can be undone you needn’t worry about making mistakes or losing your important work. And when you’re ready, you can compile your LaTeX documents into pdfs with a single click.

With ScribTeX, we are bringing LaTeX into the modern world and helping improve the way people work. Any user with an internet connection and compatible web browser can access the following features:

• A full online LaTeX environment, supporting documents spread across multiple tex files, bibliographies, media and custom packages. 
• A secure, accessible location to store and edit your files. 
• The facility to share with other users and control over whether they can see or edit your files. 
• A complete record of all changes made to every file and the option of reverting to any previous version. 

The team behind ScribTeX are experienced academics and regular LaTeX users - so they know the frustrations that can arise from working with it on a daily basis and how best to avoid these. ScribTeX has been running as a prototype for more than a year, and in that time we have learned a lot about what users want from a web-based LaTeX editor. The relaunch is about providing them with a better service based on the feedback we’ve received. ScribTeX was built to solve real-world problems.

ScribTeX offers a number of subscription plans for differing levels of use, but is free to get started. Find out more and try ScribTeX at http://www.scribtex.com

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