There was one aspect that Orwell did get glaringly wrong: the impact of technology. the limited technology shown in 1984 is all very much in the service of the state: the newspaper re-writing tools and the continuously broadcasting screens for example. But these two are both very poor predictions of how technology actually evolved over the three and a half decades between writing 1984 and 1984. Photocopiers deeply limit the effectiveness of re-writing newspapers – people would have their own copies, not much point in changing the centrally stored version then? And a network of screens continuously streaming into everyone’s homes? That’s just crying out to be subverted as a peer-to-peer network.

But these are just details and a symptom: Orwell got something much more fundamental, and surprising, wrong.

Technology is inherently liberating, not controlling; equalising not oppressive.

How is this possibly so? Modern history is replete with examples of dictators using weapons technology to do pretty horrible things in stamping out rebellion and even more recent history shows huge corporations attempting to do exactly what Orwell predicted, to their customers. But these are just anecdotes. Other anecdotes show mobile phones and hand-held GPS units being of incalculable aid to rebels. Corporations are trying to spy on their customers precisely because they were completely blind-sided by developing technology. I want to address a more fundamental point than these anecdotes.

Technology is probably reasonably described as the output of humanity’s tool-making instinct. No one really thinks of it as broadly as that, especially now. It’s inconceivable to regard the chair and the kettle as technology even though they were both once cutting-edge. Instead, technology is regarded as the recent output of our tool-making instinct. There is a question going begging here though: how do recent technological developments migrate into that background of things we just have?

Going back beyond the kettle and the chair, the spear would have once been cutting edge technology, developed after extensive R&D and in the face of punishing market conditions and intense competition by some family somewhere in the African savannah. The immediate effect of this new development within that family would have been stunning. Instead of only the elite runners capable of running down an antelope being the ones providing meat, anyone strong enough to wield a spear suddenly could. Given the very different physical requirements for the two hunting techniques this was certainly a different set of family members. And right there, the spear as a piece of technology has liberated some members of the family. Sure, hunting is still the domain of strong, young males, but this is the savannah of African a million years ago we’re talking about; it took until 1900 before we even gave women the vote. Equality is a luxury the ancient savannah could never afford.

This is still just a fascinating theory, but think on the implication: the spear was a valuable piece of technology because it helped overcome a physical limitation of the family. And this is generally true of all technology: it is valuable when it lets people do something they otherwise couldn’t. Technology is about placing the unobtainable within more people’s grasp – but not by devaluing the goal, instead by extending the grasp. As the spear placed more meat within the grasp of the family on the savannah, so the mobile phone places more of your friends within range of a chat or a helping hand now. Technology is leverage; it takes what you are already capable of and then by adding a little more in just the right way, makes you capable of something new. By it’s very nature technology is about raising the average standard of what can be achieved, leveling the field for all.

It is, in two words, inherently empowering. And to me, this is the answer to that question. When technology perfectly articulates its own empowerment it migrates into the background of society, no longer a big deal. Just there for everyone to enjoy.

Of course, that’s not to say all technological developments achieve this holy grail of leverage. Much development results in brand new technology that never sees widespread use. Many times this is the natural inefficiencies in a capitalist market. Frustrated technologists try to cope using open forums for ideas and development. Open source is a modern example, but public universities have always openly shared their work.

But still we see failures of technology.

Now, if you accept that technology has succeeded when it multiples out the abilities of humanity then the development of the technology is just part of the problem. Just as important is the interface between it and actual living, breathing humans. For technology to effectively leverage our abilities, it must become an invisible extension of ourselves; the interface, the line the technology draws around us, must be a perfect fit between humans and that goal, right there, the one they’re really after. Without something close to perfection, you’ve got just another disappointment, and worse: a waste of someone’s time spent thinking. There is a huge class of ignored and overlooked problems here in these interfaces. These are problems of design; not in the narrow ‘how-does-it-look’ sense, but in a much deeper ‘how-is-the-functioning-of-this-going-to-interact-with-a-human’ sense.

And I have come to realise that this is a question that I care deeply about. Technology is not an end-in-itself. It must be designed to be used. No, that’s too weak. Technology must be designed to make people’s lives better. When designing something don’t just think ‘how will this be used?’ Instead, think ‘how will this make someone’s life better?’ Don’t waste your life on simple, easy half goals: aim for the big one. Find your target market and work out how your idea will make their life better. And I mean, really make someone’s life better. Imagine your product fully integrated into their life. Can’t see it yet? Well, back to the design then. You’re aiming for a glove here. Accept nothing less.

Looking back at some of my essays I can see that I’ve been talking around this indirectly for some time. I recently listened to a podcast by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders and John Gruber of Daring Fireball that managed to crystallise my obsession for me. So I’m now planning of focusing on this idea. I want to see technology designed first and foremost to interact with humans, to fit into their lives invisibly and to thus make their lives better.

There will still be book reviews, because I love to read and writing those makes me a better reader, but I will be attempting to focus my other writing on this central idea: Technology Designed around People. I have no idea if I’m going to succeed, but at least focusing my rants might make me less annoying to be around. I also believe that society has a fixed amount of attention, this will be an attempt to focus some of that attention where I think it should be.

All my old blog posts have been brought across from the old Blogger blog. But also soon I’ll be using this to host some cute-slash-marginally useful applications I’ve written.

There’ll be posts about those when they are up and running.

I want to be able to ask the question ‘Who do we know in common?’, in short. A useful question, but one that can take quite a while to answer using the web site. I asked the lazy twitterverse if there was already an app for this, but my twitterverse is too small to get an answer. So, I wrote my own script. I don’t have any handy web space to run this from, so you’ll have to grab it and run it yourself. You will need to install the twitter4r gem first:

sudo gem install twitter4r

Then paste the following code into a Ruby file, and run. It takes two parameters, the names of the two users for who you want to find common ground.

require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'rexml/document'
require 'twitter'

class Twitter::User

  def all_friends
    users = friends.map { |f| f.screen_name }
    # If there's more than one page of users, we've already got the
    # first one
    page = 2
    found_users = friends.length
    while found_users >= 100
      found_users = 0
      open("http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/#{screen_name}.xml?page=#{page}") do |f|
        users_doc = REXML::Document.new(f.readlines.join(''))
        users_doc.elements.each('/users/user/screen_name') do |friend_name|
          users << friend_name.text
          found_users += 1
        end
      end
      page += 1
    end
    users
  end

end

def in_common(my_friends, other_friends)
  my_friends.select { |m_n| m_n if other_friends.member? m_n }
end

def main(me, other)
  c = Twitter::Client.new
  me_friends = c.user(me).all_friends
  other_friends = c.user(other).all_friends
  in_common(me_friends, other_friends).each do |f|
    puts "  #{f}"
  end
end

main(ARGV.shift, ARGV.shift)

Enjoy, and please let me know how it works out for you, or if you make any changes. And by the way, *this* is why RESTful APIs rock.

1. It refreshes the page after you close a tab. This is pretty irritating. Particularly if, like me, you only show unread items. Things disappear while I’m still reading them. Aargh!

2. The big one: they ‘mobilize’ web pages. That is, instead of linking to the original version of every item Google has decided to link to a rewritten version of the item. Supposedly this version will be more readable on the iPhone. Well, the iPhone actually has a really good browser. But they’ve actually significantly broken something: the iPhone web browser recognises YouTube URLs and opens them in the built-in YouTube app. Because the iPhone web browser can’t play YouTube movies. The rewriting means that this doesn’t work. Thank you Google, thank you.

Anyway, there is one feature that I miss from Google Reader: sharing items. But there’s the whole desktop application thing going on. I’m now posting items I would have shared to my Twitter feed: gga, look for items tagged #feed.

So how do I this? A pretty simple piece of AppleScript:

tell application "NetNewsWire"
        set t to title of selectedHeadline
        set u to URL of selectedHeadline
end tell
tell application "Twitterrific"
        post update t & ": " & u & " (#feed)"
end tell

A single click from NetNewsWire and I’ve posted an item to Twitter. If you think you might be interested in items I’ve previously shared, follow me on Twitter.

Why couldn’t the blogger just leave us all in peace? Why this attempt to appear that he hasn’t just gotten bored or too lazy to update? Why this empty post tantalising and teasing with a promise; only to disappoint with more deathly silence.

Yep, this is one of those posts.

But! I actually do promise to post something real soon. No! Really!

And, in a desperate attempt to appear trustworthy, here’s a short overview of what’s been going on.

• Switched from the horror of FreeBSD I now have a brand new MacBook Pro as my primary computer. After nine years I’m finally being paid to use the platform I stayed loyal to throughout the dark years. Hopefully the new computer, well set up, will actually help me write more here. It got me writing this.

• New project. Can’t talk about it. Cool though. Has inspired some general problem solving that I can talk about though. There will be some technical recipes on here for the first time.

• Briefly had a fish tank on my desk at work. It was very nice. The tank did well, but then I had to move desks. Probably worth doing, but you’d want to be more sure of where you were sitting.

• Joined a book club. Read quite a few books. And yep, that means reviews. There will be some of those coming soon.

• Still annoyed at various parts of my industry, enough to rant.

Hopefully, all that and more to be posted.

Anyway, here’s my feed: overwatering.

And here some recent sets of photos that I kind of liked. Follow the photos for larger sizes and the rest of the sets.

I will post other links to some other photos I like in the future, but if you’re interested, probably best to subscribe to my Flickr feed.

Well, of course the dry spell was caused by complaints. Apparently I was posting too many book reviews, my blog had become too much of a book-blog. It’s funny the effect that complaints and criticism can have. When you have to work out if everything you write is something that someone else will want to read, the effort of making that decision on top of the effort of writing can very quickly become pretty expensive.

It’s stupid to complain about this though. That kind of complaint is something everyone has to go through as soon as their output is read. If you want readers, then expect that, and if you’re not after readers, then don’t publish. Pretty simple. At first I kept writing my reviews without publishing, but that wasn’t enough, so they’re now back. But it doesn’t really work to say I want to publish this and readers be damned. So, a compromise. I’m interspersing my book reviews with other posts, like this one. Stories, photos and good old rants. The backlog of reviews will eventually clear. I’m not sure what will happen then…

But I also wanted this post to be some sort of explanation for why I have continued the book reviews. Originally, I said that I just wanted to keep track of what I’d read and any first impressions. But, I’ve found that planning to write a review changed the way I read and, for me, in a good way.

I found I was reading books a lot deeper. I was predicting plot twists, noticing intentional coincidences and becoming more involved and aware of the atmosphere the author was trying to create. I also started to notice the techniques the author may have used to achieve this. Turns of phrase, pacing with a description at a well-timed juncture to set the mood. The language they use and how it might affect your impressions. I found that this closer reading managed to significantly increase my enjoyment of a book – even a not particularly good one. I can’t promise it’s for everyone, but I’ve got a lot out of it and it will continue.

Everything that appears on this blog is written twice. Well, most things, like longer posts such as this and all my book reviews. The first writing is done in long hand using a fountain pen in a journal of some sort (currently, an unruled, leather wrapped Corban + Blair given to me by a couple of friends.) Then I type the entry out using Emacs and post from MarsEdit. A combination of old and new technology that I like. So why do I have this involved writing process? Why not just type directly into Blogger’s text edit field?

Well, there’s a couple of reasons. Some apply to everyone, and others apply only to me. Firstly, Blogger’s (and all web app) text fields suck. You’re just far to exposed too exposed to bugs in too many different pieces of software. If I’m going to write a long post, I want some more confidence that it’s going to survive to be published. Secondly, I live inside Emacs and I’m officially Emacs-retarded; I want my reflexive editing keystrokes to do what I expect.

But those are just technical reasons and only apply to the MarsEdit/Emacs parts of my process. Why the long-hand? The fountain pen?

In truth, I don’t really know. And to be honest, ‘affectation’ would be the biggest part of the answer. It’s hard to justify a fountain pen and a leather-bound journal any other way.

But, but, but… a blank computer screen has never been a very creatively inspirational sight for me. Even when programming. I just can’t start thinking when I’m staring at a blank text window. I need to get away from a computer and into a garden and then I can start to think.

That was without planning or thought. While living in Darwin, when doing any programming I’d figure something out – and then find myself in some part of the garden. I’d got up from the computer and walked around the garden on auto-pilot.

Anyway, a journal and a pen get me away from a computer. And once you’ve written with a fountain pen, you’ll never be able to write with any other pen again. There’s just something about the way the ink lays down while the nib glides effortlessly across the page…

But there’s also something about the act of writing for me. It’s just a great way to crystallise and direct my thinking. Of course it largely comes out as a mess on the first pass. Incoherent sentences, the same word repeated over and over again. The typing it all out again is a fantastic editing process. I can’t help but fix up all those little problems. In the end, I enjoy the writing process, much as I enjoy reading. These are things that work for me, with how I want to read and write. Always make sure you do what works for you.

Finally, in all my talk about what I write in my blog you may have noticed that there was no mention of the computer science that used to be a staple of this blog. Well, there are a couple of reasons for that. My new work project is intensely interesting and gives my a lot of scope for thinking about comp. sci. and experimenting with ideas: the sort of thing I used to do here. But the damn, freaky secrecy of my work prevents me from talking about that. There is a slight cracking of the paranoia though, and hopefully at some point I’ll be able to write about that here.

Also, hang around on reddit enough and you see a veritable flood of badly written tutorials on the latest programming feature to catch the eye of the blogosphere. I choose not to contribute to that until I have something substantially interesting to all. Surprisingly enough, my lament about protoypes fell into that category. I believe Shrew also will; there will be more about that at some point.