August 14th, 2005

The new business card

August 14th, 2005

Here’s a quick idea: When you’re next getting your business cards printed, upload your vCard (the standard electronic equivalent) to a web server somewhere, and print the URL of the vCard on your business card. Most people end up copying business cards into an electronic address book – those that are important to them, anyway – and if you do this then they’ll only have to type in one thing.

You don’t have to publish your details for all and sundry to see; you don’t need to link to it from elsewhere on your web site, and you can pick a fun URL that people won’t guess, like www.mycompany.com/007.vcf . But if you’re giving somebody the details in paper form anyway, it’s probably because you want to make it easy for them to contact you, so why not make it even easier?

Creating a vCard file is easy. On a Mac, you can just drag your address from the Address Book to your desktop or some other folder. On Windows, I think you can select a contact in Outlook or Outlook Express and do a Save As… Thunderbird, sadly, doesn’t seem to export vCards yet, though it will import them.

There was a time when almost everyone had a PalmPilot, and you could just beam your details to them. Sometimes technology takes a step backwards…

Possibly-related posts:

August 13th, 2005

Beautiful software

August 13th, 2005

One of the joys of being a Mac user is the amount of care that many software producers put into the aesthetics of their products. I wrote about this before in the context of Delicious Library, and I’ve just found another utility which made me say, “Oooh. That’s pretty!”

It’s Timeline, from Bee Documents, which does just what it says on the tin. It helps you draw timelines. It doesn’t provide you with a huge number of options or a great degree of control, but it’s really easy to use and produces lovely output.

Sample timeline
(Click for a larger view)

I think Edward Tufte would approve.

Timeline icon If you want to plot the progress of your patents, or the history of the Ottoman Empire, or just see how large a proportion of your life you really spent as an undergraduate, I’d recommend it.

There are some nice tutorials which give you ideas about how to make your timelines look good when incorporated in other design or presentation packages.

And it has a cute icon, too.


Possibly-related posts:

August 10th, 2005

Where ‘ave Ubuntu?

August 10th, 2005

Some of you will have read my distressed posts last month from my in-laws’ house as I tried to deal with their virus-ridden PCs (here and here), so I just thought I’d bring the story up to date.

One of the machines, the Win98 one, was not only really dead, but really most sincerely dead. And we had no original CDs to reinstall the OS, and no real budget to buy a new OS. So it seemed like the ideal time to make use of a free one!

Fortunately, we now had broadband, so I downloaded Knoppix, which is a version of Linux that can run from a CD. I burned one on my Mac, used it to boot up the dead machine, and managed to copy off the documents, photos emails and address book onto a flash drive. I then downloaded and made an install CD of Ubuntu, probably the first Linux distribution that comes close to being usable by normal people, and with great relief I reformatted the disk and obliterated all traces of Windows 98 from the machine, never to darken its hard disk again. Ubuntu installed beautifully, and we had a working machine again.

We then needed to connect it to the network, and, sadly, the new NetGear wifi card that was in it was not supported. I had checked this in advance, and knew that I needed to get and build some new drivers, which, with the aid of these instructions and a few flash-drive transfers from my Mac, I was able to do. This goes to prove that ordinary users may be able to use Linux now, but they probably wouldn’t be able to install it. The same is true of Windows too, though; the scale of difficulty may be different, but either would be equally unthinkable for many people.

So now my father-in-law runs Linux. His demands don’t extend much beyond email, solitaire and some occasional web-browsing and simple word processing, and it’s just fine for that. I can connect in from the other side of the world and install updates etc, and thanks to the VNC support built in to GNOME, I can view his desktop and help him with problems, and I sometimes leave post-it notes there for him after I’ve adjusted something in the middle of the night. It hasn’t been rebooted since I left a month ago.

I also gave the other machine – a Windows XP one – a good spring clean. I ran lots of checks, installed Windows security patches, paid for and installed a new Norton Antivirus with the very latest updates, and so forth. And it’s now behind a firewall.

A week after I left it had a new virus on it. We’re still trying to get rid of it.

Possibly-related posts:

August 6th, 2005

What is Preview?

August 6th, 2005

A nice article by Giles Turnbull tells you more about this Mac app which we use all the time but may not know much about.

Possibly-related posts:

August 5th, 2005

Modern Art?

August 5th, 2005

Here’s my artistic creation for today, inspired by the work of George Eliot:

FCP art

Actually, I created this rather by accident. I have been experimenting with the FXscript capabilities of Final Cut Pro. For those not familiar with these, FCP is a professional video-editing package which is widely used in the industry. It has a whole variety of effects filters to do things like changing the colour balance of your movie, adding lens flare effects and so forth. FXscript is a programming language in which you can write your own effects.

As part of my experiments I had created a filter which averages several past frames and then subtracts the result from the current frame. I then fed it some footage from the BBC’s production of Middlemarch. Casaubon is walking morosely into the distance:

Casaubon

and there’s a cut to Dr Lydgate, who is watching him depart:

Lydgate

And the result is what you see above.

Possibly-related posts:

Drive me crazy

August 5th, 2005

I powered up all my Firewire drives today. I don’t often do that.

Lots of drives

Possibly-related posts:

Quentin’s Second Law

August 5th, 2005

It is more important to read things with which you disagree than things with which you agree. How else will you broaden your horizons?

Notes:

1. A second form of this law may be phrased thus: It is more important to eat food that you don’t know, than food that you know you like.

2. Quentin’s First Law, for those who may have missed it, states that “The best way to be remembered is to invent a law”

Possibly-related posts:

August 2nd, 2005

Mighty Mouse

August 2nd, 2005

Apple have released a new mouse. Unusually for Apple, it doesn’t just have a single button. But if you were worried that Apple might have started to conform a bit too much, try working out just how many buttons it does have…

A bit more of a review on Russel Beattie’s site.

Possibly-related posts:

isbn.nu

August 2nd, 2005

Want to find books at the cheapest prices? ISBN.nu is an interesting way to do comparisons.

Possibly-related posts:

Hackers and Daughters

August 2nd, 2005

I’ve always tried to maintain a rough balance of reading one book written before my lifetime for every book I read written during my lifetime. And so it is that, having recently finished Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, I’m moving on to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters.

Wives and Daughters is wonderful, and is also the basis of a fabulous BBC dramatisation which is every bit as good, I think, as their rather better-known Pride and Prejudice. Having now read the book, I’m very impressed with how well they adapted it for the screen. Highly recommended; if you like P&P, you’ll also like W&D!

Paul Graham’s book is also splendid. I’m currently reading the chapter where he talks about why web-based software is so much nicer to develop than desktop-based software. One point he makes is that traditional desktop software requires the user to be the sysadmin. Web-based software requires the programmer to be the sysadmin. This is better for both of them!

You can hear some conversations with Paul over at IT Conversations.

Possibly-related posts:

July 27th, 2005

Keep the customer satisfied

July 27th, 2005

I’ve been reading Joel Spolsky’s book “Joel on Software“, which is very good. He has a lot of interesting articles on his web site, which I’ve read for some time, but I’m enjoying it in paper form.

One section struck me this morning:

If there’s one thing every junior consultant needs to have injected into their head with a heavy duty 2500 RPM DeWalt Drill, it’s this: Customers Don’t Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. It’s just never going to happen. Get over it.

He’s quite right. He points out that so many software projects that fail, or deliver late, or run over budget, really boil down to this: “The customer didn’t really know what they wanted, or they couldn’t explain what they wanted, or they kept changing what they wanted, or we delivered exactly what they wanted and they weren’t happy.” (You can see the rest of this chapter on Joel’s site.)

I’ve seen an important variation of this in many startup companies. When the management guys or the VCs come on board they always talk about “changing it from being a technology-focused company to a customer-focused company”, which is important. Technology for technology’s sake actually can make quite a bit of money, but it’s not a good business strategy. However, what the suits often forget is that where the technology is today is where the customers will be tomorrow.

The customers don’t know this. If you go and ask them what they’ll want tomorrow, they don’t know. They may know what they want today, though even that is often vague. So if you have something that can be built in a few weeks to meet their immediate needs, you have a chance. But if you’re in the technology world and you’re going to take a year or two to build it, remember that what they want will probably have changed by the time you’re done.

Take the case of internet-based telephony, for example. However low-quality, high-latency and occasionally unreliable VoIP may sometimes be at the moment, I don’t think anybody with any sense doubts that it’s what we’ll all be using in a few years. But if you go to the vast majority of today’s phone users and ask them what they want, they won’t tell you much that will help you build a company in this new space. How many of those people now carrying iPods could have told you a few years ago that that was what they really wanted?

Obviously, your focus must be on the customer. But in the words of Wayne Gretzky, you want to skate to where the puck is going to be, rather than where it is now. And to do that, you can’t usually rely on the customers. Nor can you rely on the business guys, or the sales guys, or the marketing guys. They’ll learn what the customer wants at about the same time as the customer does. No, to be ready for the future, at least to some degree, you need to be a technology-focused company.

Possibly-related posts:

The thud heard round the world

July 27th, 2005

John Dvorak on the official new name for Longhorn.

Possibly-related posts:

Feeds

RSS  RSS feed

Recent Comments

Categories

July 2025
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser