Entries by Alan Langford

Observations on Everything

Although "It's Fixed in the Next Release" is a mantra from software development (or rather technical support), the intent here is to apply the phrase to a broader context, for example, "It's fixed in my next reincarnation." This broad interpretation means that the entries here cover vastly unrelated subjects.

If you're looking for a tightly focused blog with short, pithy entries, you are in the wrong place (although there are some). Here, blogging is about content.

I have done one thing to make things easier on non-technical readers. All of my comments that deal with specific aspects of software development are in a category that doesn't show up in the main list. you have to select It's a Code, Code World to see these posts.

Instead of maintaining an increasingly diffuse presence on this site, where not knowing what the hell I'm going to do next gets mixed visitor reactions, I've been branching out to multiple web locations, each with a clearly defined focus.

This blog will remain diverse in topics and erratic in frequency, but instead of following the "about everything" tag line so literally, I've started moving new things to their own topic-specific places. I figure this will make this blog slightly easier to label and the new locations will benefit from a tighter focus.

This also means that this blog will suffer from something I have never really liked about blogs: updates that are about me, instead of about something I find interesting. The only upside is that I'll try to restrain myself to pointing at stuff that's interesting.

Documenting the Redevelopment of the Valhalla Inn

I live beside the Valhalla Inn, which is undergoing a transformation to the One Valhalla condo complex. As construction got underway, starting with demolition of the old hotel, I started taking pictures. I'm now posting them on posterous. They're just snapshots taken through the window of my condo lobby, so they're more documentation than art.

Canadian Entrepreneurialism and Venture Media Canada

My Internet broadcast channel, Venture Media Canada just posted its second show. After considerable frustration in trying to raise the production value of the show, I just gave up and posted the best I could manage. Fixing a Skype call in post-production is just too much work for the return you get back. That's the bad news. The good news is that the actual interview is exactly what I was hoping for when I started this project. I talk with Erika Hanchar, who with her partner Ryan, started a wedding photography business on a dream, some government funded business training, and a $500 credit card. She was 20 when they started. Seven years later, Rowell Photography has a worldwide reputation as one of the best in the business. Erika's story about the process and how they managed it is compelling.

I think all the excitement I initially had about the Venture Media Canada concept was justified. Production issues aside, these interviews offer a unique insight into what it means to start your own business. That's exactly what I was hoping for when I started and it's amazing to see it become real. I also know it will take months or even years of work before it starts to catch on. I plan to have fun with it along the way!

Movie Reviews

The small number of you who are fans of my recently launched movie reviews will notice that the flow of new reviews has stopped. This is largely because I'm dependent on a flow of premieres from studios, and making these connections takes time, and most of my effort has been on producing new content. I'll keep working on this, so bear with me.

For years – for decades – climate scientists have been telling us that global warming was going to have some seriously bad, seriously expensive effects on the environment. Slowly, the population at large has gone from considering this a "unproved theory" to a "concern", but it's never been a real "problem", at least not in the sense that a ten cent increase in the cost of gas is a problem bordering on a crisis.

We know this is human nature. As a species, we evolved to deal with immediate threats, with clear and present dangers. So while climate scientists and environmentalists move from worry, through to desperation, and finally hopelessness, the political will to take action doesn't materialize.

"Theory" is making a rapid transition to "evidence", as the severity of weather disruption increases around the world. We donate funds for disaster relief amid a growing concern that maybe all that science is right, that maybe we should take action before things get really bad. But then the headlines fade and we go back to bitching about gas prices, demanding rollbacks in electricity rates, and not electing politicians who dare to advance environmental policies because they'll be "too expensive".

Back in reality, well over 300 people have been killed by "unprecedented" tornadoes in Alabama. Damages from this one event are estimated to be between two and five billion dollars¹. Half the North American continent is experiencing "unusual" weather, and the season for this sort of storm has just begun.

So I wonder if this is the year that we have our collective watershed moment. Is this the year that we wake up and realize that we should have been taking dramatic action a decade or more ago? Because this is the new reality. It's going to be expensive, it's going to cost lives, it's going to make food more expensive – if not scarce. Even if we fixed the problem overnight (an absolute impossibility), we're stuck with a least a decade of "what you see is what you get and it's going to get worse before it gets better" weather.

Unfortunately no epiphany seems forthcoming. A quick survey of commentary surrounding the current Canadian election campaign has more people concerned with paying five cents more for a litre of gas today than they are about food shortages or dying in a "freak storm" in a few years. As the New Democratic Party surges in the polls, the most resonant criticism of their policies seems to be that a carbon tax could increase gas prices by four cents a litre, with a corresponding increase in a vast array of goods.

We have transitioned from "people will die" to "people are dying", and we're not scared yet. At least not scared enough to take meaningful action. I really hope we wake the f--- up, and soon.

---

[1] Estimate from Eqecat, a catastrophe risk-modeling firm that advises insurance, reinsurance and financial companies, as quoted by upi.com.

In his article If You Can't Understand The Difference Between Money And Content, You Have No Business Commenting On Business Models, Mike Masnick takes a shot at some "logic" advanced by Canadian IP lawyer James Gannon, who wrote "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy".

Masnick is justifiably unforgiving in his analysis: "It's brilliant only if you don't understand all of the following: money, economics, copyright, business and value. If you understand any of those things, you might recognize that the analogy makes no sense. Misunderstand all of them... well, then I can see how this argument might make sense."

Then Gannon stopped by to claim that it was rude or discourteous for Masnick to link to his content.

Newsflash: It's neither. It's what HTML was designed for! Seriously, welcome to 1990. Personally I think it's rude to advance obviously illogical arguments in defence of legacy content providers, but that's just me.

This week I launched Venture Media Canada with the first episode of The Entrepreneurial Life!

This only took about a year longer than expected (there's a reason why "perseverance" is usually listed as a top trait for entrepreneurs). Next on the list is "execution". I'm reconnecting with the people who expressed an interest in being on the show, scheduling interviews, and having fun.

Please give the site a visit and tell your friends, associates, and enemies about it!

Microsoft must have finally gotten the upper hand in Windows security.

I just talked with a non-technical friend who got a call from a call centre purporting to be Microsoft. The agent explained, in broken English, that Microsoft had "detected a virus on her computer". He then attempted to direct her to TeamViewer, a remote desktop access application.

It was at this point that she wisely terminated the call and got in touch with me.

It's pretty easy to see where this was going. A victim, under the impression that the call was from Microsoft, trusts the advice, installs TeamViewer, and gives the hacker full, unrestricted access to their computer. Under instruction from the hacker, the user happily bypasses all the security warnings, and in only take a few seconds a trojan / back door is in place and the user's system is completely compromised. The system is instantly open to credit card fraud, identity theft, spam relaying, and anything else these criminals can come up with.

The good news is that Microsoft Windows security is now clearly at a point where a human factors attack is worth the expense. The bad news is that the percentage of users who are likely to fall for this scam is far too high, and the attack vector allows for the injection of any payload. Hackers can obfuscate this malware so that a virus scanner could have a very difficult time identifying it as malicious. Worse yet, the current target might be Windows, but there's no reason why this approach can't be equally effective with other platforms.

This marks a new battleground for security in home computing. As with most other attacks, the first line of defence is education. If you have friends who are less technical, please warn them about this.

It's probably pretty obvious from this blog that my political philosophy most closely aligns with the Liberal Party. What's less obvious is that it's hardly a tight fit. Its more of an alignment of averages. Some probably perceive me as radical left (for example I believe in a guaranteed annual income for all Canadians), some as radical right (along with guaranteed income comes the cancellation of many social assistance programs). I believe in competition, but I don't subscribe to the interpretation that competition requires traditional capitalism.

In last night's English leader's debate, not only was the voice of the Green Party excluded by an irresponsible (in both senses, reckless and unaccountable) "consortium of media companies", but the environment seems to be a non-issue with all "mainstream" party leaders.

This is grossly unacceptable. If it doesn't make you angry, wake yourself up. The environment is the single biggest issue of our generation. It's one of the top issues for a majority of voters. Yet our leaders are silent. Harper could care less, it's all about the present for him. Ignatieff and Layton seem to have been terrified by Stephane Dion's attempts to push too far, too fast. Somehow they believe that the voting populace is so shallow that we can't decouple Dion, who few wanted to see as Prime Minister, from environmentally responsible policies.

So what do we have? Three leaders who care more about votes than about the country they purport to serve. Oh yeah, and Duceppe, who serves the concept of another country.

Well screw them. Screw them all. It's time to flush the lot of these self-serving myopic power seekers out of politics. This time around I'm voting Green in protest, and I urge you to do the same, independent of your usual political inclinations. I realize that if all 50 of my readers go Green, not much will change, so if you buy into my argument, encourage as many people as you can to do the same.

It seems the only way to get environmental issues on the policy agenda is through a measure of popular vote. In the absence of voting reform (another Green party policy), the only way the political establishment will take on the environment before it's a full blown crisis is if the populace put their votes where their concerns are.

I can see some objections to this approach, and I want to address them.

Voting Green will split the left and give Harper a majority. Bull. Take a closer look at the Green Party platform. It's right of the Liberals. To hell with Harper swinging left in a desperate attempt to pick up a majority, it might even be right of the Conservatives in some respects. The Greens should be splitting the vote on the right.

If the Greens win, they won't have the experience to govern. Absolutely true. But the chances of even a Green minority are somewhere between getting hit by lightning twice and winning a lottery. On the other hand, if they score a few seats, they'll actually be able to keep the environment on the agenda. Besides, can you imagine the NDP in a minority situation? It's not much prettier, but people vote for them.

Are there good counter-arguments? Post them in the comments.

About a year ago, I came up with the idea of doing a series of video interviews with Canadian entrepreneurs. Hardly a unique idea, but my take on it was to focus on the experience and process of starting and running your own business instead of just talking about what the business does.

I subsequently put a fair bit of effort into getting everything set up: build a site, bootstrap a platform... all in my "spare" time. Then I stalled. That platform will never be ready because it suffers from the chicken and egg syndrome. There's no site without content, and there's no content without a site. Frustrated, I'm solving that problem by redefining it away. This post is the egg.

So, what's this all about?

As Canadian entrepreneurs, I don't think we give ourselves enough credit, or get enough respect. Other cultures seem to embrace the concept of starting your own business – of taking a risk – more than we do. Canadians also seem to have an aversion to "failure". Despite the oft-quoted "entrepreneurs start an average of seven businesses before they succeed", Canadians seem to look at someone who has tried once and failed as a loser. This is simply not true.

The fact is that there is no adequate school for entrepreneurs, and while it's possible to take courses that will give you some important skills, there never will be a course that guarantees to teach you everything your start-up needs to succeed. The best way to learn is to try. The business might fail, but the only time there's a real failure is when the entrepreneur doesn't learn from experience, or learns but doesn't use the experience to try again.

Part of that education is to get an understanding of what it really means to be entrepreneurial. One good way to do that is to talk to people who are doing it, and who have done it. This means not only celebrating our successes, but talking to entrepreneurs about where they struggled, and what they would have done differently. Anyone who has read something like Why we shut NewsTilt down knows that there's a huge amount to be learned from someone who has tried, failed, but come away wiser.

So this is an open call to Canadian entrepreneurs who are running a business in Canada. Successful, struggling, or licking your wounds. I want to talk with you about your experiences, from what led you into starting your own business through what you've learned, what you expect to learn, and more. If you faced unique challenges, particularly because of race, culture, or sex, I really want to hear from you.

The process is simple. All you need is Skype and a web camera. First we'll chat without recording, so I can get an idea of your experiences and where the conversation should go. Then we do a recorded conversation, targeting a 15 minute session length (if there's really a lot to cover, then we break it up and do multiple recordings). Then I do some post production and upload it to a video sharing/streaming site under a Creative Commons license.

If you're interested in doing this, get in touch and we'll set something up.

The theft of perfectly functional manufactured goods for scrap value has become a serious issue over the past decade. The number of stories of small to medium scale theft, primarily of copper, has gone from rarity to ubiquitous. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has declared copper theft a critical threat to infrastructure. The size of the problem has grown because the recovered value of many easily recycled raw materials is exceeds the risk of getting caught.

This can be generalized. If raw materials aren't cheap relative to wages, civilization collapses by dismantling itself. This is a grave matter, and I find the implications profound.

I consider myself an environmentalist. I've always believed that one way to build a more environmentally responsible economy was to factor in the "true" cost of extracting resources from the natural environment — despite never having come up with any practical ideas as to how such a cost could be established. Under such a scheme, all raw materials would be significantly more expensive. But the baseline for measuring "expensive" has to be wages. So there's a deeply fundamental flaw in my belief, namely that it leads to the self destruction of civilization. My simplistic prescription is now completely trashed and a new model is required, because the status quo doesn't work either.

On the other hand I have always been at odds with much of the environmental movement, in that I grudgingly advocate nuclear power. Not because I think it's clean and wonderful and cheap, but because it looks like the only way we can bridge from fossil fuels to something sustainable without the catastrophic collapse of civilization.¹

I mention energy here because it is a big factor in the cost of production and distribution of raw materials. As time passes, we need to go farther, dig deeper, and expend more energy to extract them, so energy is not only a significant cost factor but rising faster relative to other costs. Mining is one of those places where nuclear seems problematic. Having some mining company build a reactor in a remote part of a third world country just to operate a mine seems foolish at best, and a formula for either future environmental disasters or the proliferation of nuclear weapons at worst.

Even in politically stable populated areas, building a couple of hundred nuclear reactors is a much less adequate "bridge solution" than I had hoped. To put it bluntly, there's no point in having a few terawatt hours of nuclear energy available if someone keeps tearing down the transmission lines for scrap. For that matter it won't matter if that power is generated by the cleanest imaginable source. If infrastructure is constantly under attack, reliable energy could easily mean small scale generation in well defended fiefdoms.

I wish I had a solution for this one, even one that's overly simplistic. 2010 should go down in history as the year dire predictions of the cost of climate change started to swing rapidly from radical wing-nut environmentalist overstatements to brutally underestimated realities. It would be nice if 2011 was marked as the year policy makers started to get a grasp of the magnitude of the threats posed by more costly energy and moved urgently to address the problem. We should now be on the equivalent of a war footing, dedicating the bulk of our fiscal, intellectual, and physical resources to solve these problems. Inexpensive energy is axiomatic to the current structure of our society. If we fail to find a way to generate it, our social structures will undergo major upheaval. Major upheaval is never good.

Instead, we remain complacent. The probability of defeat rises with each day; the cost of victory increases exponentially. It is a time for activism. Call your local politician and remind him or her that there are no elections in feudal societies.

 
1. For the record I don't particularly enjoy doom-saying by sticking "collapse" and "civilization" together. I just happen to think that the problem is that serious.

I've been engaged with social media since forever. Always found it fascinating, even exciting. I really like Twitter. Now Quora seems interesting, but in a semi-social-media sort of way. There's a bit of a shift happening. A lot of "early adopters" have been doing the Quora thing for a while and now it's on the upswing of that familiar knee function of exponential growth.

Meanwhile, Twitter seems a little less vibrant. Is it because all the cool kids are playing with Quora? Partially. After all anyone with a real job only has so much time to dicker with this stuff, unless you're a rare beast: a Professional Social Media Guru that's a real job. So maybe Twitter is a little less shimmering with excitement because really interesting people are spending less time on it.

But that isn't all. That only explains part of it.

I think the dampening of Twitter is something that's been repeated many times with other trends – most notably blogging – and the common factor is audience. I think audience kills.

Along with a few million people, I signed on to Twitter about two years ago (call me a just-past-the-bleeding-edge adopter). What was compelling about it was the community. Chances you were going to find someone interesting, or even be followed by someone interesting were pretty high. That's exciting.

Then it became a mass phenomenon. People stopped talking to their community of followers and stated talking to their Audience. Many people stripped character from their tweets, so they didn't run a risk of offending their Audience. Characterless marketing opportunity opportunists joined in droves. Now I get endless series of follows who have triggered off some word I've used. Say the dreaded "Search Engine Optimization", expect to get followed by 35 so-called experts, half of whom promote the same methods I labelled as absolute garbage in the tweet that triggered the follow! No dialogue, no engagement, not even an argument. Just follow on keyword. These aren't people, they're applications. It's not a conversation, it's not anything.

The result is low grade ore. Generic, bland grey goo. Repetitions of repetitions of the mildly informative, rehashed. It's not spam, it's not interesting. It's a fire hose of information with few gems. The vibrancy is increasingly hard to find.

This decay is all down to Audience. Many blogs were great – when almost nobody read them. Now they write to their Audience, mostly with corresponding non-offensive blandness. Twitter offers diminishing returns, thanks to Audience. Facebook continues to survive, but only if you "friend" people you stand a chance of recognizing in a police lineup, which severely limits scope. LinkedIn has gone from a way to connect to people with specific skills or knowledge to ways to connect to people with a mail address. Now there's value.

I see MetaFilter is charging a nominal amount ($5.00) to create an account, mostly to keep the spam out. Maybe this is the kernel of a good idea. Maybe the cost of joining a community should increase as the membership grows. Maybe someone will develop an automated value ranking system that makes connecting to a site a low cost proposition for high value individuals, and vice versa. I'd sign up for that. Screw the audience.