Category Archives: Tech

Teach our Kids to Code

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I tweeted a Guardian article the other week, in which John Naughton looked at the Raspberry Pi and it’s potential, along with several other projects, to fix the broken way in which kids are taught about technology in schools.

A key driver of this new tech resistance movement is a desire to rescue kids from the fate that the Department of Education has in mind for them, namely as passive consumers of information appliances and services created by giant foreign corporations. Where governments dream up projects like the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), the resistance seeks to grant kids a “Licence to Tinker” – to demystify the technology by providing tools and ideas that enable them to understand how modern networked devices work.

Although seemingly not his own words, John uses the interesting phrase “Licence to Tinker” to describe the laudable idea that children should be taught how to understand technology, rather than merely using it.

The catchphrase is slick, but to me it worryingly implies that you need a licence in order to open these things up, and comparisons with the dreaded ECDL seems hardly likely to inspire confidence in this small revolution.

Fortunately, Emma Mulqueeny, in her blog post on the same topic, comes up with the fabulous rallying call “Teach our kids to code”, also the name of her e-petition, which you really should sign if you’ve not already.

As she notes, there’s a collective responsibility on us all to keep pushing this message. Eric Schmidt may worry about the future of the UK’s tech competitiveness, but “teach our kids to code” shows us the simplicity of the solution to these apparent problems.

Most people would recognise the importance of teaching children how to think critically about a piece of literature, and even writing their own pieces, as well as merely reading it. Yet we don’t do the same with software, which like mainstream literature and journalism tends to be written by a small-ish set of people (at least compared with the overall population) with a certain set of principles, and often an economic interest in doing things a certain way.

We should teach kids to code because it’s essential that they have the skills to examine and question the digital world we now live in, and when they really don’t agree that they can do their own thing.

If you agree with this sentiment, then please sign the petition.

Net Neutrality

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I was horrified enough at Ed Vaisey’s terrible sentiments he expressed over Net Neutrality last week, to write to my MP on the issue. Hopefully Angie will be more responsive to letters from constituents than my last MP was. Still waiting for a reply on that one…

The letter’s based on Open Rights Group’s template, but I added my own Tory-friendly additions in bold. Sending a generic letter is better than none at all, but given you’re writing to an individual it’s clearly better to tailor the argument for them.

I’d strongly encourage you to do the same if you care about universal access to information.

Dear Ms Bray,

I am writing to ask you to sign the Net Neutrality EDM 1036 first signed by Tom Watson MP, Julian Huppert MP and Peter Bottomley MP.

http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=42025

Today the Coalition Government has taken a huge step towards increasing the transparency of Government by announcing the release of all central government spending data over £25,000 for the first time. You may have seen that the Prime Minister has stressed his support for this drive via a video posted this morning on the Number 10 web site.

This is a significant move which will help reduce the waste inherited from Labour and help drive the growth of an information industry which Francis Maude estimates could contribute up to £6bn to the UK economy. The work which his department has done over the last six months is making the UK a world leader in this field.

Last week however, Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, stated that the UK will allow Internet Service Providers to decide which websites and services can reach their customers at what speed.

This threatens the idea of free access to information to all. If traffic from established media operators is prioritised above others then this threatens the ability of independent organisations to help government find where inefficiencies exist in the system, using open data. It promotes centralism over localism and diversity in our information instructure and is a backwards step in Britain’s development.

The change – often called removing “net neutrality” or introducing ”network discrimination” has already led to complaints from companies including the BBC and Skype, an Internet telephone company, that their content may be slowed down by Internet Services Providers. ISPs, including BT, Sky and Virgin, provide TV and phone services which would give them a reason slowing down certain Internet services provided by competitors.

The danger is that, while some “traffic management” to prevent congestion may be reasonable, allowing ISPs to do what they want, with no checks other “transparency” to customers, will lead to significant market abuse and loss of innovation on the Internet. New services may not start up if they cannot be guaranteed fair access to UK Internet customers.

There are ways this problem could be prevented. One would be an industry agreement by major ISPs not to discriminate against competitors, such as has been put in place in Norway. Another would be to require “minimum service guarantees” including an Open Internet.

Please sign the EDM, and raise this issue with Ed Vaizey, as the Minister responsible.

Thanks,
Will Abson

A Limited Revolution

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I’ve spent the last couple of days catching up on recent news, including some of the iPad stuff from the other week.

A few blog posts have pointed out that the people talking about it are probably not the target market for the device, and in any case they’re likely to already own a half-decent laptop/desktop and probably an iPhone too.

But the separation is not just about geeks versus non-geeks, it’s about creators and consumers.

Consumers in the classic sense will love the iPad. It’s designed for browsing the web, reading e-books, listening to music and watching movies. Though iTunes, Apple already makes plenty of dollars from these people and will likely be even more successful with a larger device. A bigger screen means more pixels, and HD means more money.

But for those of us who like to think of ourselves as creators the iPad, with it’s locked-down OS and lack of third party app store support, is not such a good thing. Nor is it helpful if we want to provide the next generation with the tools they need to think creatively and independently, and to encourage them to hack at and mash-up software, services and content.

The iPad may well transform home computing, but that will be as far as the revolution goes. We need more open platforms that we can build on if we’re going to carry on innovating, not another device to lock us further into Apple’s walled garden, and their vision of how computing should be.

The open road

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Well done to John and John on the amazing article in the Guardian’s Technology section today. We made it onto page three!

Sadly the online version lacks the pretty pictures in the paper copy on my desk, but it’s a well-written piece, even if it does paint rather a depressing picture of Governmental take-up of open source in the UK.

GNOME 2.20

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This is a great example of why I love free software – with the latest version of GNOME out the door, Evolution now helpfully warns you if you try to send an e-mail containing the word “attached” or similar but neglect to actually attach a file to the message.

Is that not the kind of simple, yet brilliant feature that when you hear about it makes you wonder why nobody’s thought of it before? Amazing.

The same old tricks

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I read this evening that Apple have once again resorted to blocking third party software from accessing the song databases build into every iPod.

Last time it was over Real cracking their DRM and I didn’t care so much given that I can’t use most of their proprietary-ware anyway, but now Apple have completely broken the main Linux-based library used by the fabulous Rhythmbox and Banshee, amongst others.

What I find most sad is the fact that the changes they’ve made – involving some kind of checksumming built into the latest iPod firmware – serve no useful purpose whatsoever other than to limit the ways in which consumers can use their own players.

That Apple would spend engineering dollars in order to make iPods less useful – arguably completely useless to anyone using Linux – is appalling. But not surprising to anyone who’s followed their moves in recent years.

I was seriously considering buying an iPod up until yesterday. I’m certainly not any more.

Apple-icious? I’d say not

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On Apple.com‘s new look-and-feel, discovered via Laurie.

First thoughts: it looks like someone’s just found the Colors > Invert menu item in Photoshop. Is black really back in again? I thought we’d seen the end of back of white-on-black text, banished along with circa-1998 websites and MS-DOS windows. Sure, it looks different from the old design, but not vastly so and I’d actually say it’s a step back in terms of the nice minimalistic look they previously had going on.

Their news ticker is neat, although it looks rather similar to our own.

Overall I give them seven out of ten – but only because it was so good before, they haven’t changed it that much and their small army of graphic designers seem to be able to make anything look good. Even if it is in black.

Dell take a dose of Ubuntu

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Congratulations to the guys at Canonical following today’s joint announcement with Dell. Having used Ubuntu myself since the first release over two-and-a-half years ago I know it’s a natural fit for Dell, but given their relationships with Red Hat and Novell I’m still slightly surprised they’re not offering Fedora or SUSE options as well.

That aside, this is great day not just for Linux but for anyone like me who doesn’t want their new computer preloaded with a bloated, proprietary, DRM-embracing hairball of an operating system like Vista but really can’t face the hassle of going the self-build route. I think I’ve worked out where the next PC is coming from.

Adobe come good

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I meant to write about this yesterday, but apparently trying to squeeze a week’s worth of work into four days prior to my day off today and fit in a trip to the gym meant I didn’t quite get round to doing so.

So Adobe have released Flex under the MPL, which is great news for the following reasons:

  • Building rich web-based user interfaces sucks at the moment. Creating anything vaguely useful means working with a bunch of semi-related standards such as HTML, CSS, AJAX that between them just about manage to do what you want them to today. It’s a mess and we need a better solution.
  • As Miguel commented on his blog, Microsoft have now consolidated their next-generation framework (now dubbed Silverlight) and I have no doubt that they will try hard to woo developers with this latest weapon in theirproprietary arsenal as they look to take over more and more of the web. Mozilla may finally be helping to claw back some of the browser share from M$, but if open standards can’t win the battle to define the technologies that are used to build the next generation of applications then we’re all in trouble. Unless you run Windows, of course.
  • Having Adobe choose an open source license to release their code under provides further validation that this is a model that works for businesses. As if we needed that, though 🙂

Even more encouraging is Adobe’s promise that as well as releasing the source code under the MPL, they will allow others to contribute to this code. That’s when you start to get the full benefit of being an open source outfit, and Adobe have obviously twigged that.

There’s no mention of their Flash player in the release, the lack of a full open source implementation of the player obviously being a significant barrier to the take-up of Flash on Linux in particular, which will limit it’s usefulness on these platforms. Releasing this code under a similar license would no doubt win Adobe a lot more kudos in the open source community, but the Flex announcement will still be warmly welcomed by many. Maybe not by Mr Gates, though.

Adobe come good

Posted on by

I meant to write about this yesterday, but apparently trying to squeeze a week’s worth of work into four days prior to my day off today and fit in a trip to the gym meant I didn’t quite get round to doing so.

So Adobe have released Flex under the MPL, which is great news for the following reasons:

  • Building rich web-based user interfaces sucks at the moment. Creating anything vaguely useful means working with a bunch of semi-related standards such as HTML, CSS, AJAX that between them just about manage to do what you want them to today. It’s a mess and we need a better solution.
  • As Miguel commented on his blog, Microsoft have now consolidated their next-generation framework (now dubbed Silverlight) and I have no doubt that they will try hard to woo developers with this latest weapon in their proprietary arsenal as they look to take over more and more of the web. Mozilla may finally be helping to claw back some of the browser share from M$, but if open standards can’t win the battle to define the technologies that are used to build the next generation of applications then we’re all in trouble. Unless you run Windows, of course.
  • Having Adobe choose an open source license to release their code under provides further validation that this is a model that works for businesses. As if we needed that, though 🙂

Even more encouraging is Adobe’s promise that as well as releasing the source code under the MPL, they will allow others to contribute to this code. That’s when you start to get the full benefit of being an open source outfit, and Adobe have obviously twigged that.

There’s no mention of their Flash player in the release, the lack of a full open source implementation of the player obviously being a significant barrier to the take-up of Flash on Linux in particular, which will limit it’s usefulness on these platforms. Releasing this code under a similar license would no doubt win Adobe a lot more kudos in the open source community, but the Flex announcement will still be warmly welcomed by many. Maybe not by Mr Gates, though.