Fighting with competing eBook standards

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last year, I was involved in the production of Fujitsu’s White Book of Cloud Security (continuing the series after the White Book of Cloud Adoption) and earlier today I was sent copies in eBook form.  I emailed them to my Kindle (app), only to find that Amazon doesn’t support .EPUB format books.  Whilst I understand why Amazon might like its own content to appear in a different format, not supporting the .EPUB standard for people to add their own content seems strange (and I’m not alone in thinking this – Jason Perlow wrote about Amazon’s lack of support for .EPUB back in 2010).

Thankfully, it’s pretty simple to convert between .EPUB and MOBI formats, using freely available software (Calibre) – as  highlighted on Twitter by James Williams (@LoneGunmanUK) and Travis Atkinson (@TravisWhayne). It’s a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut (I don’t need an eBook library – just a conversion tool) but it’s undoubtably powerful and it seemed to do the job for me.

Incidentally, on my iPad, the .MOBI files viewed in the Kindle app seem to have better results than the .EPUBs in Apple iBooks (which seemed to resize some graphics to the point of illegibility).

Short takes: Kids coding in C (!); new car; and finally “fit at 40”!

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week I kicked off my new initiative to actually get some blog posts out, despite not having time for all the details…

This week was less event-focused but nevertheless contained a few things that I thought were worthy of note.

Kids coding in C? (Our Arduino)

Last weekend, I was “playing” with my new Arduino proptotyping board, with my sons.  Understandably, my 5 year-old wasn’t too bothered (to be fair, he liked putting components onto the breadboard) but I was amazed to see just how my eldest (who is 7) grasped the programming side of things.  I’m not saying he’s writing C – but just using some example code to flash a set of LEDs in sequence, he asked why he was putting // in front of some lines.  I showed him that each was a function call and he was “turning on and off” different things that the program could do.  Before I knew it, he wanted to chain functions together, before then moving on changing the delay times on the lights.  I thought that the coding side of things would be an uphill struggle but I was really encouraged to see how quickly kids can start to adapt the examples. Hopefully our Raspberry Pi will arrive later this month – and then I’ll get him writing in Scratch or another child-friendly environment!

New toy for Mark

Last November, I wrote about ordering my new car and it arrived on Monday. No longer am I tarred with Top Gear-esque comments about Audi drivers (I did really like my A4 though) – I’m now a sensible, 40-something Volkswagen-driving type! The Tiguan (or “softroader” as my hardcore Range Rover-driving manager calls it) has a towbar too, so I should be able to load the family bikes on more easily and, hopefully, we’ll get out a bit more this spring/summer… which leads me on to the next feature…

Another decade on the clock – and my “Fit at 40” challenge draws to a close

Towards the end of the week I celebrated  my 40th birthday – which marks the end of my Fit at 40 challenge. Having hit my target weight a couple of weeks ago, I’ve managed to hold that off but haven’t managed to push any further yet.  The final numbers are not quite in, but it looks like I’ll have raised just under £2000 (plus gift aid) for The Prostate Cancer Charity – thanks again to everyone who has supported me and helped make me a happier, healthier husband and father to my wife and children!

Improving presentation content and style

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few weeks ago now, I attended a webcast as part of a series run by Citrix to promote GoToMeeting. Rather than saying “hey, look at our product it does x, y and z”, Citrix used the product to host others giving advice on presentation techniques.

Ironically, some of the presentations were awful – I dropped out of one on “presenting with impact” as (in my opinion) it lacked any kind of impact; suffered from poor audio on the main presenter’s line; started out with irrelevant facts (which were later suggested as an approach to make a session memorable); and then launched into a poll before even getting going.  I did later return to the recording of this session and  around presenting with passion, preparation, body language and the need for practice/preparation – but the fact remains that it initially turned me right off… (and I was surprised to find a professional communicator who hadn’t seen Prezi – although I’m not really a fan of that tool). Sadly, those first impressions stuck with me for the same presenter’s follow-up session on “communicating with impact”, which really failed to keep my attention (if I was being charitable, I might say that was perhaps as much an indictment of the delivery method as of the content).

Thankfully, another webcast was more useful – Roger Courville from 1080 Group spoke about “eight things we can do to improve virtual presentations” and, by and large, they were good tips (for face to face presentations too) so I’m sharing my notes here:

  1. Put a complete idea in the slide title – and keep slides visual for “picture superiority” (although the brain does see a few words as an image).
  2. Create a sense of presence – paint a vision to demonstrate 1:1 attention/facilitate a common connection.
  3. Draw the audience’s eyes to your slide’s main point – direct attention visually (additive) or reduce and simplify (subtractive) – make sure the audience doesn’t have to guess what the main point is!
  4. Keep “wholes” whole… and then build it out if you want to – i.e. show the big picture and then drill down into details.
  5. Analyse (who, what, where, when, why and how), synthesise (action or relationship), visualise (consider how things might look visually or spatially). It’s possible to get a tutorial (and template) for this tip by subscribing to the 1080 Group newsletter.
  6. Pause for power – in advance of a key point for a sense of anticipation or afterwards to allow the brain time to process. Pause for effect and pause for interactions. And, to add some insight from the communicating with impact presentation, allow silence, to give time to digest information and to add gravitas.
  7. Ask your audience what or when is best. Improve things based on feedback – either “on the fly” during the presentation, or by building an understanding over time.  And, although this wasn’t one of Roger’s tips, it seems like a good point to take another cue from the communicating with impact presentation: consider the audience’s DNA (demographic, needs, and attitude) – and be ready to flex your style.
  8. Start you next presentation by “storyboarding” (see the comments on “beyond bullet points” below) – think about the flow of the presentation (content), before filling in details (think how PowerPoint leads us to step straight in and start creating bullets!) – and “design in” interactions (demo, poll, etc.).  By way of illustration, Roger also referred to Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points book which I confess I haven’t read but is structured around three core themes:
    1. Tell a story – you only have a few seconds to create an emotional impact.
    2. Distil your ideas – instead of throwing everything into the presentation, go into the minds of the audience and figure out what to communicate (with an effective structure).
    3. Create visual prompts – not just pretty slides but building out the storyboard to take the audience on a journey to an effective presentation.

Two more points I picked up that I though were worthy of note:

  • The average soundbite dropped from 43 seconds in 1968 to less than 8 in 2010 – reflecting our reduction in attention span?
  • Slides don’t equal duration – more slides do not (necessarily) equal more content. [I particularly subscribe to this one!]

And a quote:

“The act of organising information is in itself an insight” [Edward Tufte]

Even the presentations I were less enamoured with presented some insight, like:

  • Get someone you trust to review your presentation style – and let them be frank, to tell you about your style, impact, and use of filler words like um and err (which come across as lacking in confidence).
  • Direct conversations with open and closed questions, together with summaries (for example, “let me just check…”, list key points and end with a closed question).
  • Online presentations lack feedback from listening noises (like those that might be applied on the phone).

Using this information, I’m hoping to improve my future presentations and, judging by the number of “death by PowerPoint” sessions that I attend, a few other people could learn from this too. There are also a few more resources that might come in handy:

Releasing and retracting a factory-fitted towbar on a Volkswagen Tiguan

Posted on By Mark Wilson

This post is probably of limited value because it only applies to a factory-fitted retractable towbar on certain Volkswagen models (mine’s a Tiguan Sport) but, being a towbar newbie (I don’t tow but I do want to fix a decent bike rack onto my car!), I wanted to see how to “fold out” the towbar (and to retract it again).  The driver who delivered the car didn’t know how, there are no instructions in the handbook, and googling didn’t turn up much either but it’s quite straightforward once you find out how…

  1. Lift the rear hatch (boot) door and look out for a cover on the top-left of the rear bumper.
  2. Lift this cover by tucking something into the hole and prising it off (the car key works well for this) – there is a “knob” underneath.
  3. Give the “knob” a good tug and the towbar will be released. Pull the towbar it out until it locks into place.
  4. To retract the towbar repeat steps 1-3 but push the towbar back in under the bumper.

Useful Links: March 2012

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

Short takes: from the consumerisation of IT to open data

Posted on By Mark Wilson

This week has been a crazy one – and things don’t look like getting much easier over the next few weeks as we enter a new financial year and my job shifts its focus to be less externally-focused and more about technical strategy and governance. This blog has always been my personal blog – rather than something for my work – but the number of posts is inversely proportional to the amount of time I have on my hands which, right now, is not very much at all.

So I’m taking a new tack… each time I attend an event, instead of trying to write up all the key points, I’ll blog about the highlights and then (hopefully) come back with some details later… well, that’s the plan at least…

This week (on top of all the corporate stuff that I can’t really write about here), I attended two really worthwhile events that were very different but equally worthy of note – for very different reasons.

IDC Consumerisation of IT 2012 briefing

Analyst briefings are normally pretty dry: pick a hotel somewhere; sit on uncomfortable chairs in a large meeting room; and listen to analysts talk about their latest findings, accompanied with some PowerPoint (which you might, or might not have access to later…). This one was much better – and kudos is due to the IDC team that arranged it.

Not only was London’s Charlotte Street Hotel a much better venue (it may have had a tiny circulation area for pre/post event networking but it has a fantastic, cinema-style screening room) but there was a good mix of content as analysts covered a variety of consumerisation-based topics from an overview (risk management or business transformation) through sessions on how mobile devices are shaping the enterprise and on the state of the PC market, on to consumerisation and the cloud before finally looking at the impact of consumerisation on the IT services market.

I did cause some controversy though: tweeting a throwaway comment from an analyst about the organisation’s continued use of Windows XP attracted attention from one of the journalists who follows me in the US (IDC suggested that I took the comment out of context – which I would dispute – although, to be fair, much of the industry suffers from “Cobblers Shoes”); and I was not at all convinced by IDC’s positioning of VDI as an appropach to consumerisation (it’s a tactical solution at best – strategically we should be thinking past the concept of a “desktop” and focusing on secure access to apps and data, not on devices and operating systems) – prompting a follow-up email from the analyst concerned.

It used to be vendors (mostly Microsoft) that I argued with – now it seems I need to work on my analyst relations!

Ordnance Survey Open Data Master Class

I recently wrote a white paper looking at the potential to use linked data to connect and exploit big data and I have to admit that I find “big” data a bit dull really (Dan Young’s tweet made me laugh).

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/dan0young/status/184997625865576448″]

What I find truly exciting though is the concept of a web of (linked) open data. It’s all very well writing white papers about the concepts but I wanted to roll my sleeves up and have a go for myself so, when I saw that Ordnance Survey were running a series of “master classes”, I booked myself onto a session and headed down to the OS headquarters in Southampton. That was interesting in itself as I worked on a project at Ordnance Survey to move the organisation from Microsoft Mail to Exchange Server in the late 1990s but that was at the old premises – they’ve recently moved to a brand new building (purely office space – printing is outsourced these days) and it was interesting to see how things have moved on.

After an introduction to open data, Ordnance Survey’s Ian Holt (the GeoDoctor) took us through some of the OS open data sets that are available before Chris Parker spoke about Geovation and some of the challenges they are running (working with 100%Open, who also collaborate with some of my colleagues on Fujitsu’s Open Innovation Service). We then moved on to some practical sessions that have been created by Samuel Leung at the University of Southampton, using nothing more than some open source GIS software (Quantum GIS) and Microsoft Excel (although anything that can edit .CSV files would do really) – the materials are available for anyone to download if they want to have a go.

Even though the exercises were purely desktop-based (I would have liked to mash up some open data on the web) it was a great introduction to working with open data (from finding and accessing it, through to carying out some meaningful analysis) and I learned that open data is not just for developers!

[Update 2 April 2012: I won’t be writing another post about the IDC consumerisation of IT event as they have emailed all delegates to say that it was a private session and they don’t want people to publish notes/pictures]

Virtual worlds in 2022 (Dr Richard Bartle at #digitalsurrey)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

It’s been a few months since I’ve been along to a Digital Surrey event but last night I went to see Dr Richard Bartle (the massively multiplayer online gaming pioneer whose work on personality types was mentioned last year in the first Digital Surrey event I attended, Michael Wu’s talk on the science of gamification) speak about the future of virtual worlds.

Dr Richard Bartle talks at Digital SurreyIn contrast to Lewis Richards’ Virtual Worlds talk at CSC last year, Richard Bartle’s talk was focused on three possible courses of development for the massively multiplayer online gaming (MMO) industry (slides are available).  He started out by commenting that, had he been asked the same question in 1992, he’d think we would be further ahead than we are by now…

Three views of the future

In the first view of virtual worlds in 2022, Richard looked at the legal issues that threaten online gaming, including:

  • Applying reasonable laws wrongly – for example a well-meaning judge applying the same rules in World of Warcraft to Second Life and “its just a game” is no longer a way in which to avoid the real world.
  • Unfair contracts – with End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs) found to be unfair and ownership over virtual goods bringing property laws into play (Linden Labs, 2007).
  • Intellectual property laws – ownership prevents the destruction or alteration of virtual property; it’s impossible to stop people from selling “stuff” (even if it ruins the game); an inability to deny access by banning things that have unintended consequences (leaving gaming open to compensation claims); and implications of publishing works of art (licensing, records of origin, etc.) – what happens if the rights to an object upon which others are built is suddenly removed?
  • Gaming laws – even free to play games have value in their objects (as proven in Dutch law in 2012) and, if everything has a value, gaming is essentially about chance and cash rewards – i.e. gambling! Some parts of the world (e.g. the USA) have fierce laws on gambling…
  • Money laundering – with a scenario something like: 1) Steal real-world money; 2) hand money to a front; 3) front buys virtual currency; 4) pass virtual currency to game characters; 5) sell virtual goods (legitimately); 6) clean money!
  • Taxation laws – if virtual money has real world value, then it becomes taxable (both income and sales).
  • Patents – it’s possible to patent obvious “inventions” for very little outlay but it costs a lot to get a patent revoked – this stifles innovation.

For these reasons, Richard Bartle says he sees a bleak future when he goes to legal or policy conferences – just a programmers see bugs in code, lawyers see bugs in laws – and accountants see bugs everywhere (it’s their job to highlight problems).

In the second view, the repeated incursions of reality into virtual worlds gradually break down the distinction between real and virtual – and virtual worlds are no longer imaginary places of freedom and adjuncts to reality.  New MMOs open up and recruit players from existing MMOs – but these are the disloyal players – or they get MMO “newbies”. With too much reality, MMOs become unsustainable as fantasy and existing players’ expectations are lowered whilst new players didn’t have high expectations to start with… Meanwhile there’s the question of monetisation – with 95% of casual gamers being funded by the 5% who pay – those who pay have the ability to do so (i.e. are richer in real life) and their ability to become more successful in the game removes any sense of fair play – is it still a game if one can buy success? Reaching out to children becomes attractive – both as a source of new gamers and also because micropayments make it easier to take money from children as the credits are paid for by the parents. And, as non-gamers use “gamification” in marketing and “edutainment” as a teaching aid, the attempts to combine the fun games and “un-fun” education lead to nothing more than un-fun games. In effect the sanctity of game spaces as retreats from reality disappears…

In Richard Bartle’s third view of the future, MMO designers found themselves able to influence politics. In 2010, the median age of the UK population was 40 (41 for women, 38 for men) so half the population were born in 1970 or later and grew up with access to computers. These people play games, don’t feel addicted to them and resent politicians imply gamers are psychopaths. Consequently politicians representing games as anti-social find themselves unpopular. Gaming flowers with new casual games, new players, and simplified creation of virtual worlds.

When Richard speaks to designers and developers he sees passion, imagination, and freedom of spirit because MMOs give something that your can’t get elsewhere – the ability to be yourself. If that goes away, they simply create new virtual worlds.

What is most likely?

As for which future view is most likely, Richard’s whole presentation was linked through three films (High Noon, The Misfits, and Dirty Harry) – all of which featured actors who were also in The Good the Bad and the Ugly. So he summed up the likely courses using that film:

  • The Good: virtual worlds provide a place for humans to be humans.
  • The Bad: virtual worlds are stifled with real-world laws and policy.
  • The Ugly: virtual worlds become mundane.

He considers that MMOs provide too much that people want in order not to be successful and that, if legislated away to obscurity, that would only be a temporary state and they would return. I guess we’ll see when we look back from 2022…

My view

As a non-gamer (perhaps more accurately a casual gamer – I play the odd game on a tablet or a smartphone, and I do have an Xbox 360 – upon which my sons and I play Lego Pirates of the Caribbean and Kinect Sports, so I guess they are virtual worlds?), I found a lot of Richard’s views on “reality” rather difficult to grasp – and I got the impression that I wasn’t alone. Even so, the vision of the real world tainting the virtual world was fascinating – and perhaps, I fear, a little too real (it’s not just online gaming that is impacted by well-meaning but ultimately flawed real world decisions).

Speaking with one of the other attendees at the event, who mentioned someone had been questioning the link between the Internet and the real world, I guess my inability to understand the mindset of a MMO gamer is not so far removed from those who can’t see why I would want to live my life on social media…

Credits

Thanks again to the Digital Surrey team for staging another worthwhile event, sponsored by Martin Stillman from the Venture Strategy Partnership and hosted by Cameron Wilson from Surrey Enterprise.

[Update 27 March 2012: added link to Richard’s blog post and presentation materials]

Fit at 40: Achievement unlocked

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve written previously on this blog about my Fit at 40 challenge and, for those who haven’t already seen my excited tweet from earlier today, I weighed in and found that I have hit my “realistic yet challenging” goal of getting to 14 and a half stone (92kg) by my 40th birthday (I’d already completed the three races at 10K distance or above which was the other part of the challenge).

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/markwilsonit/statuses/182798646729904128″]

I have to say that I’m totally stoked. Whilst some people might say something like “yeah, whatever, so you lost some weight, it’s just willpower isn’t it?”, I can tell you there’s a lot more to it than that – it’s taken a year (so far) or hard work and dedication, together with the occasional bought of self-degradation after falling off the wagon. This wasn’t a diet, it was a change in lifestyle; reprogramming my brain if you like (and this week’s BBC Horizon documentary which examined how two hormones impact our appetite and “fullness” was very interesting).

JustGiving - Sponsor me please!I’ve still got 2 weeks to go until my 40th, so there’s room for a stretch target yet (actually, I’ve set myself a goal of losing another 13kg before my 41st birthday – to bring my BMI into the “healthy” range – how achievable that is I don’t know as that’s going back to around my teenage weight but it’s worth a try). Most importantly though, I’ve achieved what I set out to do by my 40th (a fitter, happier, healthier me) and raised a chunk of money for The Prostate Cancer Charity in the process. If you’d like to donate to The Prostate Cancer Charity, my JustGiving page is still up and running!

So, here are the stats:

Start (Fat) Today (Fit) Difference
Weight 113kg 92kg 21kg
Chest 120.5cm 112cm 8.5cm
Waist 122cm 107cm 15cm
Upper Arm Not recorded 33cm Not recorded
Thigh Not recorded 60cm Not recorded
Hip 109cm 100cm 9cm
Body Fat 28.5% 22.5% 6.5%
BMI 35.7 (Obese) 29.0 (Overweight) 6.7

Incidentally, on a recent overseas trip, I noticed that our (heavy) suitcase weighed 21kg. That’s how much less weight my body is carrying around. Scary really.

Getting started with Arduino

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Arduino UnoA couple of days ago, my new Arduino board arrived and, last night, I finally got around to having a play.

For those who don’t know what an Arduino is:

“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”

[Arduino website]

The first thing I noticed was how small the board is (smaller than a credit card) and how large the USB connector makes it… but, when I was working out what I needed to buy (I’ve always been interested in electronics, but never really got into it), I learned a few things about Arduino that might be useful to other newbies:

  • You can buy various Arduino boards, with a variety of processors. I picked up an Arduino Uno, which seems to be a good starting point. My Uno shipped with a USB cable that can also provide power (i.e. powering from a battery or other DC source is optional, as Dave Jacoby and Gareth Halfacree confirmed for me on Twitter – thanks guys). Note that some Uno boards have surface-mounted (SMB) chips – you might prefer to go for a DIP version instead (as I did) as this can be swapped out if necessary.
  • Shields are boards that sit on top of the Arduino and add additional functionality.
  • Whilst my Arduino has an LED on the board that I can interact with to get my head around the concept, you’ll need some more bits and bobs to do anything more complex. There are various starter kits on the interwebs (many or which include the board and a USB cable). I’ve just ordered an ARDX kit from .: oomlout :. (as recommended by Gareth) but one of the reasons for going for this one is that it’s also available without the board if you already have one…  when it arrives, I’ll have a breadboard, and a whole bunch of components to try out different ideas and get my head around controlling electronics programmatically.
  • I bought my board from Amazon (RS Components’ shipping charges were too high and Maplin’s stock levels are appalling) but, I’ve since been recommended a number of suppliers including the aforementioned .: oomlout :., Cool Components and SK Pang (thanks to Andy Piper).

The intention is that I’ll use one or more of these devices to control a model railway (yes, it’s geeky, but it could be a fun project) but, for now, I’ll start off by getting to grips with turning on lights and other similarly simple tasks, and I’ll probably try and get my sons interested too (they’ve already asked what it is… and seen some videos of other people’s projects).

The Arduino integrated developer environment (IDE) runs on Windows, OS X or Linux but, as this is a geek project and my netbook is basically redundant (and very portable), I decided to use that and install it on Ubuntu (11.10). Installation was very simple (I just followed the instructions on the Arduino Playground – a wiki for the Arduino community – and found v22 of the Arduino IDE in the Ubuntu software centre).

With the IDE installed, I set about writing code. Or, perhaps more accurately, I set about modifying other people’s code. There are a load of examples on the Arduino playground and a good getting started guide for Arduino at Bit-Tech but I found the Arduino Tutorials at Lady Ada really accessible for a newbie like me. Pretty soon I used lesson 1 and lesson 2 to change the 1 second blinking LED on my board to a variety of settings, and finally to just off (ready for when I have a go at this with my son).  Once my starter kit arrives with a bunch more components, I’ll try a do something a little more complicated! Maybe one day I’ll even get past the IDE and onto some real C programming (it’s been a while since I wrote any code, let alone in C).

Right… now it’s time to go off and find some cool projects for my new toy…

Image credit: Arduino Uno by Snootlab, on Flickr, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

Installing iLife applications from a Mac OS X restore DVD

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last night’s blog post should have had a video with it, except I didn’t get it ready in time… so it doesn’t (yet).  I want to cut together a few scenes and iMovie will probably do the job for me without too much codec hassle but when I last rebuilt my MacBook I didn’t bother with any of the iLife apps (except iPhoto – and I only use that for photo books/calendars).

As it turns out it’s easy enough to install iLife apps without resorting to a complete restore – Apple Support Article HT2604 has the details and, after grovelling around in the loft for a few minutes, I found the OS X install discs that came with my MacBook, inserted disc 1, double-clicked the Install Bundled Software icon and, one customised installation later, iMovie is ready for me to use…