Category Archives: General

Breakfast at Auntie’s

An interesting start to the day today.

At an hour at which all civilised people should still be tucked up in bed, I presented myself at the dear old BBC Television Centre to be interviewed on the Breakfast TV programme. I was then whisked upstairs to do the same on Radio 5 Live before coming back downstairs again to do a slight variation on the theme on TV again.

And the reason for all this early-morning scurrying through the rather charming maze that is the BBC?

Well, it’s about 20 years since the start of the World Wide Web. (Do you remember when we used to call it by its full name to distinguish it from the more common arachnean use?) So they’ve been running various anniversary features and interviews, and the old webcam story is always a good light-hearted one when most of the rest of the day’s news is about economic collapse!

It’s hard to pin an exact date on the start of the web, but it’s usually taken to be Aug 6, 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee posted a message on a usenet newsgroup describing the project and telling people where to get the code if they wanted to try it out. Hence the 20th-birthday celebrations today. It seems amazing to me that undergraduates leaving college next year will have been born after the web, and will never have known a world without it.

One of the first things I remember doing with the web, probably some time in 1992, was writing a web server which was effectively a blogging tool, though it would be a long time before anyone would have called it that. It showed a page and let you type something at the bottom; that ‘something’ would then be appended to the page with a timestamp. I used it for a little while as a lab notebook, but not very seriously or for very long. I was really just experimenting with the idea of web pages that could alter themselves… And of pages that could be edited through the browser itself.

Status-Q came much later: my first post here was not until early 2001, so it’s a relative youngster. But it has at least, I realise, been going now for more than half of the life of the web.

Anyway, here are links to recordings of the radio and TV interviews in case anyone’s interested.

The laugh and frolic

Digging through old photos, I found this one from a visit to the Great Wall of China in 2007:

(click for larger version)

What really happened at DisplayLink?

On Friday, Business Weekly (a small local publication not to be confused with BusinessWeek) published a most unfortunate article about recent changes at DisplayLink, entitled ‘DisplayLink Chairman Says Company Needed to Grow Up‘. Here’s an extract:

Founders Dr Andrew Fisher and Tim Glauert left the company after what the chairman described as an amicable discussion about the future direction of the business.
A number of battle-hardened industry veterans were drafted in, among them Paul Murphy as European managing director.

and

O’Keeffe said: “I am always a little nervous about jettisoning founders of a company because they can be very passionate about the business and you have to look at various angles.
“It’s often the nature of startup companies to involve themselves more with the R & D than hard commercial sales and both Tim and Andy are bright, creative engineers. To put it simply, we needed to become a proper grown-up business and get away from the research cycle. We had a discussion and felt it best to part company.

This is, to put it bluntly, outrageous.

It is hard not to read between the lines a very strong suggestion that the company has had difficulties up to now because of a couple of recalcitrant founders, and, now that they have gone and the investors and battle-hardened veterans are in control, everything will be OK.

Now, I have been interviewed a couple of times by Business Weekly in the past, and have considered them as a bit better than your average local rag. And I have reason to believe that Graham O’Keeffe is an honourable man. So I will do them both the favour of suggesting that this is a tragic breakdown of communication tied to a single rather irresponsible journalist’s reporting, which could, if unchallenged, do great damage to the careers of two of the nicest, smartest, most inventive people I know, who have poured many years of their lives into creating a company for the benefit of these same investors.

So let me try to set the record straight here.

Martin King and I founded DisplayLink, and I was the CEO for the first couple of years. Having hired an excellent replacement CEO, we moved on to our next startup project. Tim and Andy were there right from the start, and built the core technology on which DisplayLink still depends, and have been with the company ever since. DisplayLink would not be what it is today without them, and a considerable number of people have them to thank for their jobs and livelihood.

Company and investor press releases are, however, an interesting branch of mythology which is worthy of closer literary study. One theme which can often be traced in this genre is the idea that founders single-handedly make or break the company. So it’s very convenient for the VCs to be able to tell the right story about them.

And so it was that, after Martin and I left, Andy and Tim were given the title of Founders, and Martin and I were expunged from the record. I was consulted about this – at least about the first part – and readily gave my approval. Andy and Tim rightly deserved that status from the start, and the company website could proudly boast the ongoing enthusiastic involvement of the Founders.

At least while it was convenient for them to do so.

In this article, however, we see another rather different clichéd plot theme in high-tech startup mythology, about how everything turned for the better after the company finally got rid of those difficult Founders. I would have credited even Business Weekly with a little more imagination than that. You can read the history of Cisco and others to see earlier examples of this theme in the literature.

However, I am in the interesting position of still having many links into DisplayLink at all levels of the company, and yet am under no contractual obligations to toe the party line. So I can clearly state, when others might find it more difficult, that nothing I hear from inside the company would in any way suggest that Tim and Andy are at all responsible for the somewhat rocky ride it has had recently and the budgetary constraints that have forced the company to let them, and a lot of other good people, go.

Some may consider the very difficult market conditions at present. And others may notice a rather surprising fact: that the article completely fails to mention the recent departure of the latest CEO: a disastrous appointment forced on the company by the investors some while ago and yet, despite his departure at about the same time as Tim and Andy, mysteriously absent from the latest press releases….

I shall point no fingers at anyone, but leave the reader to ponder whether it is really likely that Tim and Andy’s enthusiasm for forward-thinking R&D has been the source of any difficulties. Or whether, for example, people who were actually on the board of directors might have considered doing the honourable thing and shouldering some of the blame, rather than finding scapegoats.

Sigh.

Well, DisplayLink has many very good, very smart people remaining, and some great technology, and I wish the company all the best for the future, even though it has lost some of its brightest stars.

And let me state for the avoidance of any doubt that if I ever have the chance of working with Tim & Andy again I will jump at it. And I would strongly recommend any other technology company to do the same.

And people, please remember that wise old saying which you should repeat to yourself every single morning while brushing your teeth…

    Don’t believe what you read in the papers.

Note: I have consulted none of the people mentioned before writing this article. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own – though I have reason to believe they are echoed by many.

Update, just a few hours later: Good! The contents of my inbox this morning confirm that I am indeed very far from being alone in these views.

Exbiblio RIP and IP

I haven’t been able to talk about it before now, but thanks to the USPTO it appears to be public knowledge that the Exbiblio patent portfolio was recently acquired by Google. (The company basically closed down after Martin King passed away last year.)

As is so often the case with my exploits, by the time they actually make any money I no longer have any financial stake in them! But it’s encouraging to think that the weeks and months that I and others put into writing those patents did at least produce something that others found valuable enough to pay reasonably substantial sums for them.

Congrats to all concerned!

What goes around comes around…

It’s – wow! – almost twenty years since we set up the original Trojan Room coffee pot camera.

Now some cunning Danish developers have a demo of how you can monitor the level of your coffee using a Management Pack plugin for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, which is quite fun, and I imagine is even more useful if you’ve ever actually heard of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007…

Alright, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.

OpenCV is a wonderfully full-featured computer vision library. I’ve just written a very simple demo of the built-in face recogniser. It finds a face and scales it to a fixed size. If you watch my eyes in the viewfinder window, you’ll see they stay pretty much in the same place however I move around the room.

All sorts of things could be done to improve the frame-rate if needed, but this was just a quick test I put together over a couple of hours while learning about the library. Back in ancient history, when I did my PhD, this kind of thing would have taken weeks… The title of this post, if you’re not familiar with it, is from the famous closing scene of Sunset Boulevard, which you can see here. Of course, as soon as I thought of using this title, I realised that I could also grant Gloria Swanson’s greatest wish. So here’s my version…

It needs some smoothing, but still quite fun.

Want a bargain degree?

The Guardian is running a piece under an attention-grabbing but rather irresponsible headline: The £135 university lecture – but is it worth it?.

To achieve this figure, they take the planned fees for the University of Birmingham – £9000/yr – and divide it by the rather short terms – 22 weeks/year – and the number of lectures attended by students of probably the least demanding course on offer, at least in number of lectures: English literature and philosophy.

The result is about £136/lecture.

Rosie Taylor, the journalist, does mention in passing that

Admittedly, part of their fees will go towards the university’s day-to-day running costs, from stocking the library and organising exams to getting toilets cleaned and maintaining buildings.

and then ignores this rather important fact for the rest of the piece.

These arts students who have three lectures a week – and this is not unusual – would have been a subject of great envy for me as an Engineering undergrad. While they auditioned for Footlights and explored each others’ cocktail cabinets… Well, OK, that’s a little unfair, but I think I had more than twenty lectures per week, including a full set on Saturday mornings. That was in addition to practical sessions and small-group supervisions.

Those who run and attend the arts courses would assert that lectures were only a small part of the overall educational experience, but it will be interesting to see whether ‘value for money’ becomes a part of students’ considerations when choosing a course. I’m not sure whether that would be a good thing or not. Indeed, it could lead to a sort of snobbery – who attends the most expensive lectures on the campus? Or perhaps, “this course will cost you a lot per lecture but you’ll get a degree after only sitting through a few of them!”

Anyway, it’s interesting to note that on this highly artificial metric, my Engineering & Computer Science degree at Cambridge would be around one-tenth of the price of Literature & Philosophy at Brimingham.

What, you still measure images in megapixels?

The BBC has a lovely composite image of the Royal Wedding crowds, totalling 1.15 gigapixels.

You can use a scrollwheel or equivalent to zoom in and out.

Thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.

Remoting Voting?

Have discovered, at short notice, that I need to be in Germany on the 5th May, which means I won’t be able to vote in the AV referendum: the first vote for quite some time that I do actually care about.

I could have opted to vote by post or by proxy, but only if I knew well in advance that I would be away. There’s nothing I can do now. So my question is this:

Why can’t I vote online?

Other countries manage it, and in general I think the UK does a good job of online governmental services. I can submit my tax return, fill in the census, complete a VAT return, pay the TV licence and buy my car road tax from the comfort of my web browser. The government web services are reliable, easy to use, and do their job well.

So why not voting?

There are challenges, yes, in making a secure system, but if memory serves, the process of voting in person simply involves walking into the polling station and saying that you’re me and you live at my house. So we can’t claim to be as concerned about security in our democratic processes as we are in, say, getting a mobile phone contract, though I imagine casting someone else’s vote is probably a criminal offence.

Still, anyone keen enough to register my vote for the YES campaign that they’d like to pop into my polling station and be me for a day?

Think of it as an alternative voting system.

Philosophical wisdom for today

When I was young we had a poster with some quotations on it on the wall of the loo at my parents’ house. I had forgotten this one until now:

To do is to be
– Nietzsche

To be is to do
– Kant

Do be do be do
– Sinatra

Location, location, location

Others have written lots of good stuff about the recent discovery that the iPhone keeps a log of your location and that this gets synced to your PC, where it can be found by those who know where to look. Many are shocked by the fact that it is stored in unencrypted form. And it’s not just the iPhone.

Now, personally, I am very pleased to have this information available and am thinking about the best ways to make use of it. I had been considering writing an iPhone app to do exactly this but was concerned about the likely implications to the battery life, so I’m delighted that I don’t need to bother.

Others’ opinions vary widely, however, about how this data might be abused. Some talk about how, because it’s unencrypted, the Feds (or the scary faceless organisation of your choice) could get hold of it if they broke into your home. Well, yes, but they have so many other ways of tracking you – credit cards, speed cameras and of course the triangulation information from your phone company, that breaking into your house seems a bit unnecessary. Others are worried, apparently, that their wives might be able to detect any little deceptions they may wish to keep secret. Such people have the sympathy they deserve.

But the real question for me is why location information causes such concern.

Did you know that Apple also produces another very sinister product? It gathers all your personal secret communications from the cloud and stores it in – gasp! – unencrypted form on your hard disk! It’s called Mail – the email program. And if you fire up Skype, you can look back through those past Skype messages. And iCal will let someone browse your personal appointments!

So, of course, you stop these things by putting passwords on your computer, encrypting your home directory if you’re concerned, or making sure that only people you trust have access to your machine. This is what we’ve always done.

The only shocking thing about this situation is that many people didn’t know that physical location was one of the things that could be traced. For all I know my laptop and phone may keep a history of the MAC addresses of wifi base stations they have connected to, which can also be used to identify location. Does yours? And your email provider probably has a log of the IP addresses from which you’ve connected to pick up your mail, which can also be used to follow your movements. And who knows what someone, including your wife, might be able to deduce if they had a good look at your sat-nav.

I remember a stunned silence at a business breakfast a few months back when I pointed out to the assembled company that Vodafone knew when they broke the speed limit. They’d never thought of that.

Well, now you know.

Fear of flying

Here’s an interesting article published in Psychological Science in 2004.

Basically, the results suggested that in the first few months following 9/11, because many more people in the States drove their cars longer distances, being fearful of flying, the increased number of deaths on the roads were actually greater than the number of people who died in the 9/11 planes.

There are some who disagree with their conclusion, saying that we don’t really know the reasons why people chose to drive instead of flying. Rose suggested that people may have opted for the car because they feared, not the flying, but the long security procedures at the airports!

But an interesting study, none the less, I thought.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser