Social Fatique

While checking out the blogs of some fellow IBMers (Adrian Spender and Andy Piper) I came across this video from RTC (Irish broadcaster):



The video talks about IBMs engagement with social networking. We have Beehive (like facebook), and BlueTwit (like twitter) among other systems. Usually news reports tell us that social networking costs companies money in lost productivity. In this I will admit that IBM is at least different, we are encouraged to engage in and experiment with these things.

That said I wonder if there is another cost to these tools. Each tool that you use has an associated cognitive load. You need to remember to access each tool regularly to tend your garden so to speak. I find that keeping track of facebook and twitter is hard enough, without adding Beehive and BlueTwit. This is why I rarely log into linked in.

I have said before that I am a neo-luddite, but perhaps I am instead a web luddite. In fact I like tools, and I am kind of a early adopter at work, I signed up for Lotus Note v8 and Sametime v7.5 before it was commonly used. I am slow to adopt new web tools though. I use gmail, via my mac mail client. I didn't really use twitter until I discovered twhirl, and my sister was on facebook and myspace long before I was.

Hmm, I started out thinking about social networking overload, and I ended up thinking that all I need for these tools is for them not to be web based. Perhaps one day I'll join you all in the 21st century.

Alasdair

Blog Envy

I've had this blog for over two years now and I find it really hard coming up with stuff to say. I have no idea who reads this blog, I maintain it mostly because as someone who works in IT I feel like I ought to. For all I know no one out there reads or cares. Not only that I cannot image who might be interested in reading what I have to say.

I envy people like Scott Adams who can generate a blog post every day, a blog post that is funny or interesting. Or Bruce Schneier who somehow manages to post multiple times a day relvant security related information. Or Jeff Atwood who somehow manages to come up with thought provoking articles about computing and software every few days. I realize that each of these people are well known, but I could select less well known people who still manage it. Not to mention those famous people all started out somewhere.

I wonder what the difference between people like them and me. Is it that I have nothing to say? Or is it that I do not know how to say it? Perhaps it is that they believe that people want to hear what they have to say. I guess what I am saying is, I have no idea what makes a good blog. Research mode on.

Alasdair

Can cook, wont cook.

I've written before about how hard it can be to eat when you are on your own. Cooking for two is easier than cooking for one. You have two people to share the workload; be it the cooking or the washing up. Many ingredients are setup for meals for two or more, not one. So you cook for two nights, and that involves reheating and it is the same meal two nights in a row. Yuck.

Another problem with cooking for one is that whenever you invite people round for dinner it becomes a much bigger chore. Many of my friends are now married so cooking for one goes to cooking for three, or even five. There is a much bigger difference in difficulty when moving from one to three or more people. More prep work, more washing up (lots more), and so on. It takes me a while to pluck up the courage to arrange a dinner party.

The final thing about cooking that is hard work is this. If I feel down I do not feel like cooking, so I do not cook or eat properly. If I am enjoying work I have a habit of working late (in fact sometimes even when I'm hating work I work late which is very sad), in these cases I get back from work at 8pm or later at which point I'm too tired to eat properly.

So as you can see eating properly is not easy for me. All these behaviours are learned, and bad, but I still have them. I could either change them, or I could implore scientists to invent a food pill. Guess which I am hoping for.

Alasdair

Minor blog redesign

While ITV was providing me with such classic lines as: "you rebel scum", "your overconfidence is your weakness" and "your faith in your friends is yours" I was playing around with the look of my blog.

I last changed the blog in May when I reformatted to a wider format. I never liked 800 pixels wide blogs and I finally found a justification to widen it. This time it is to move the sidebar content out of the main blog post listing. I never really liked it being stuck on the inside, so I have moved it outside.

My only outstanding problem with this is that the centre line should go down the middle of the text, but it is offset somewhat as the center line takes into account the sidebar content. This is not noticable if you only have 1024 pixels of width, but I think most people have more these days. The only fix I have so far centres it well for wider screens, but at the expense of 1024 pixel wide screens.

Alasdair

P.S. "Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and fully operational battle station", the inner geek in me loves these lines.

Five things I wish scientists would invent

Hi,

So I've been thinking recently that there are lots of things we have to do that are just a waste of time. So I've come up with a list of ten things I wish could be invented so I do not have to do it:

1. Sonic shower. They have them in star wars and star trek, they are faster, less messy and you do not need to dry yourself. I know showers with water can be nice, but unless you have a power shower it just is not worth the time.
2. Sleep machine. This is not to say I do not like sleeping, but when you have had three bad nights of sleep in a row you get kind of ratty. Wouldn't it be nice if you could get on a machine for 5 minutes or so and be fully refreshed as if you had a full nights sleep? If Judge Dredd can have one, why not me?
3. Transporter. My brother lives in San Francisco and sometimes I would like to be able to come home from work (in the UK) and go and have lunch with him (lunch for him, dinner for me). Oh, not to mention it would nice to not have a 30 minute commute to work. Star Trek has them and I want them. Oh, and please don't tell me it is "scientifically impossible" I don't care. I still want one.
   
4. Food Replicator. As I have mentioned before cooking for one is a nightmere. Another idea from Star Trek (I'm spotting an unintended theme here).
5. Domestic Robots. I hate washing, cleaning ironing and tidying. I know I am not alone in this, so lets have some bipedal robot that can do it all for us, and please lets not have ones that decide to take over the world like in the movie I, Robot.

So inventors out there get working!

Living in hope.
Alasdair

Quantum Cryptography pointless?

I always laugh when I see headlines like this on BBC websites:

"Unbreakable' encryption unveiled"

and even more so when I realize it is talking about "Quantum Cryptography". The idea is that you send data down a fibre optic cable and if anyone views it before you do it changes the photons used to send the data, so you can tell someone is watching. This does not really ensure confidentiality though as the data has been viewed, so you still need to encrypt the data using traditional cryptography.

So what does this really gain us? Well not much is the truth. We can share data and detect when some else sees it, but if they see it we lost already. So we encrypt the data and now we know if someone has seen the encrypted data, but again having encrypted it we should not care if it is seen. Not really that useful. Well in fact it is useful in one way, we use it to send the symmetric encryption keys to the other party. If the key is viewed we try again, if not we use it knowing no one else knows it. Wonderful a secure unbreakable way of exchanging keys.

Only we already have good ways of exchanging keys. It is called PKI, or asymetric encryption. In fact Quantum key exchange does have a slight problem in that I could perform a denial of service attack by watching every photon on the fibre. Thus a symmetric key can never be exchanged. This can be got around by using PKI, but now what is the point of doing this?

Well this has been my thinking on the subject for a while, so I was pleasently surprised to read Bruce Schneier's take on the subject today.

Alasdair

Eating out veggie style

Yesterday I went out to dinner with my ex-flatmate (and her boyfriend) who live in Kingston-Upon-Thames. Our first choice was to go to the New Inn on Ham Common. So we phoned them up to ensure they had veggie options on their menu. They said yes, so we set out for the pub; to find the menu only contained one vegetarian main option. Roasted peppers with rice cakes, hardly appetizing.

So we decided instead to go to the Riverside Vegetaria. It was amazing. Everything on the menu is vegetarian, most of it is vegan and gluten free. It was the best meal out I have had in a long time, and to cap it all I had more that one option.

Bring on the revolution :)

Alasdair

Upated: To correct spelling