Everybody has had experiences where they solved a problem or were able to think something through whilst sleeping. Happens to me quite a lot since my day-to-day life involves a lot of "working in my head", whether that's computer programming, or playing chess, or working on a mathematics problem. The number of times I've played a chess game and then analysed some related position in a dream (after finally falling asleep) is enormous. Or been trying to solve some geometry problem and realised how to redraw the diagram whilst resting.

Last night and today was particularly surreal, though.

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Topics: software/debugging, thinking

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For Australia, today was about The Apology. A speech made in parliament, by the prime minister, apologising for years of mistreatment and hurt inflicted upon aboriginal families over the hundred years leading up to 1970. The Stolen Generations. Families separated so that their children wouldn't "have to" grow up aboriginal.

There's a lot of history there, a lot of justifications at the time and after the fact, for why these actions were carried out. What hasn't happened in the intervening years, until today, is that the government said "sorry". Today, the Rudd Labour Government delivered the apology and, importantly, used that word. Sorry. A word that the previous government and Prime Minister refused, unambiguously, to use.

The apology itself was quite well written. It reads well and will be a good statement for the future. The delivery of the apology, the speech, wasn't as great. To me, Kevin Rudd is not a good public speaker, his oratorical style is not particularly inspiring or commanding. Still, today's event was a ceremony, a time to put the text on record and see the man bearing the leadership say the words. The delivery doesn't diminish the significance of the moment. The text and the fact that the apology was delivered will outlive the video.

Sadly, the event was diminished by the bipartisan nature, when opposition leader Brenden Nelson stood up to deliver his apology. His apology was very close to "I've been told I should say sorry and I'm sorry I have to be here. I didn't do it." He completely missed the point. This wasn't a wiping clean of the slate, or an assigning of blame to individuals. It was an acceptance of the consequences of a national policy that has caused long-term damage to the native inhabitants of this land. Trying to spin the impact as Nelson did was unworthy of the moment. Better that he said nothing at all, given that his party, with a dozen years in government, of which he has been a senior member for many years, did previous little in the past, certainly not up to the point of apologising on behalf of the nation (the previous prime minister, John Howard, once expressed "personal regret" that events happened, but that wasn't what people wanted to hear from somebody acting as the nation's leader).

I am highly cynical of the effectiveness of federal politics and not a particularly fervent citizen; it's simply a fact of life that I have to be a citizen of one country. Heavens knows I am not a Kevin Rudd fan and suspect his government will not be a lot better than the Liberals over the coming years. However, acts like today (at least the apology portion), are a good reminder of why I'm also not entirely ashamed to be Australian. For the federal government of the day to finally get over this hurdle, acknowledge that they are the current bearers of the mantle of responsibility and accountability, whose predecessors implemented some exceedingly poor policy with negative impacts right down to today (social workers now find it hard to intervene in genuine cases because of the resemblance of these actions to those precipitating the Stolen Generation)... for that to eventually take place, is a huge step. That was the partisan-less moment of the day, not the opportunity given to the opposition to also speak. There will be people calling for monetary compensation and other sorts of retribution. However, that's not going to correct history. Working out direct and indirect consequences and trying to right them is terribly difficult and a large cheque cannot do it. There will be debate about what could have been for months to come, I'm sure. Not everybody, whether of European, Asian or Australian aboriginal descent, will agree with what happened today. But all of that is by the wayside. The point is that this quite reasonable step, this thing that was made into an insurmountable mountain by previous governments refusal to step up, has been addressed and can now become something that happened and is not the elephant-size roadblock in the room.

I didn't really know what to expect today when I woke up to watch the speech (I am not a morning person; it required an effort). However, I decided to watch because it was something I'd wanted to see happen for many years. I remember discussions around tables when I was at University back in the late 80's about why the government of the day didn't have the spine to address the issue, I'm glad I watched this morning. The media audio grabs and summary cannot do justice to watching it in full and it was a rare moment when I was proud of what the government was doing. I don't know what the effects of today will be in five or ten years time. Maybe we'll be no better off, nationwide, than now. Maybe things will change. It's time for everybody to stop relying on the past as a crutch, a cross or a weapon and address the situation as it exists today.

Topics: home, life, politics, thinking, writing

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Last month, I wrote a quick summary of some of my experiences trying out OpenID support in various places. At the time, I noted that Google didn't have any OpenID support in blogger.

At the end of November, they announced support for it, although I only noticed this last week. As you can see from the varied comments on that article (warning: more noise than signal at times), this hasn't been met with universal approval, mostly because of the trade-offs requires for usability.

Today, I wanted to leave a comment on a blogger-hosted blog and I tried out this new feature. Google do not get a passing grade.

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Topics: technology/openid, thinking

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When Simon Willison started to do a lot of publicity work for OpenID last year, I figured it was probably the right time to at least learn as much about it as possible and start trying things out. Just over a year later and, whilst as a technical specification and a service it shows a lot of promise, as something for users, it doesn't seem to be there quite yet.

Lately I've been looking a lot at the user experience. Whenever possible, I've been using OpenID logins on sites that allow it for comments. I've also been noticing sites that aren't OpenID-enabled when they really should be. My feelings have been mostly ones of disappointment. The user experience doesn't end up being very inviting as a rule and I'm gradually arriving at the point where I'm nervous about using OpenID because it's misused so often. Time to draw a few conclusions.

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Topics: technology/openid, thinking

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A few weeks ago, after a bit of pestering from a couple of friends, I succumbed to peer pressure and signed up for Facebook. I keep hearing about how great these new social sites are meant to be, but nothing has hit me over the head with their Wow! factor yet.

So, a few thoughts after trying it out for a while. It's not too bad and I'll stay signed up and current, I suspect. For me, it's an interesting intersection of two, previously fairly disjoint, parts of life: the IT portion and the "everything else" bit. Most of my online presence is fairly invisible to the latter group, since I hang out in reasonably technical circles. Turns out a lot of non-IT friends are already on facebook, particularly the younger ones who are right into the school/university social stuff. That should make it easier for me to keep up to date with what they're doing (and vice-versa).

Being able to pull information in from other sources (a.k.a. Facebook applications) seems like a mixed bag. Setting aside the various toys that look like they'll have fad life-cycles, it's handy that I can display my Flickr photos without a lot of effort (although it did take a while to find an app that had a nice combination of display and ease-of-use). Somehow — and this is a slightly tricky problem — it would be nice if photos pulled from elsewhere could be labelled just as directly imported photos are. The tagging of people in photos and inter-connectedness feature seems nice. It could be done as an overlay that checks the existing image against a hash so that they don't overlay the details onto a changed image.

The whole relatively carefree way in which people label themselves and others in photos leads to another point, though: the whole place really is a stalker's paradise. Most profile information seems reasonably well protected by default — you can't view it without having been befriended. However, photos provide a leaky source of names and images. Maybe I'm overreacting (having been a casual teacher in a couple of all-girls schools in the past, this stuff was well highlighted by school regulations and local laws), but is there a whole generation or half-generation growing up without sufficient "stranger danger" sanity checks in their head?

It looks like the intention (of the Facebook owners) is that Facebook somehow becomes the centre of the social sphere for somebody and everybody views information through the Facebook lens. I can't see that working for me, at least. Trying to pack that much information into a single browser screen and a paned layout leads to a mess. Still, I will be making bits of information available through my Facebook page for others' benefit, since some people do seem to live there, from the frequency of updates. Can't throw stones too much, though, I live in my feed reader sometimes and on mailing lists at other times.

Syndication feeds are only used sporadically throughout the site. They appear in a lot of places, but are conspicuously absent in others. Might be work in progress, might be oversight, might be shallow, woolly thinking. Hard to say.

Trying to determine the current status of various things is a varying experience, too. I requested an addition of my high school a couple of days ago. There's no tracking ticket number supplied, no feedback; the request has just gone into the ether and either it's taking longer than they predicted, or it's been declined. Similarly, sometimes Facebook tells me I have a friend-request pending with somebody and sometimes it seems to forget (or I do). I thought maybe it dropped back to "add as friend" if the person rejected you the first time around, but that doesn't seem to be the case — one person I could add as a new friend accepted a weeks old invite. I have a bad memory for relatively unimportant things and I could have expected some kind of "you have requests pending to these people" list to be available somewhere. Not sure how ignores/rejections should be handled, though. Do they also have a "you have been found to be unworthy" list? Or just drop back to where you can try again (which is the current behaviour)? Social interactions, particularly disagreements about status, are tricky, so I suspect this is actually a hard question.

Conclusion: I can see why it's a hit with many people, particularly school- and company-based social circles. The cross-pollination between my tech and non-tech (but not Internet-ignorant) social circles is an unexpected surprise and makes it worth it for me (useful, in other words). Seems more useful than other social networks I've dabbled in (e.g. LinkedIn).

Topics: life, thinking, technology/web

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Syndication has become important over the last few years. Sure, it's been around for a while, but these days it's almost at a point where I could see my parents using it — OS installations are shipping with feed readers, third-party apps are readily available and the feeds themselves are pretty standard on many "updatable" sites.

That being said, having ubiquitous feeds throughout a site is not a universal trait. If creating a feed is any real amount of work, it means you have to actually design the feature and work out where you want feeds. If creating feeds is simple and somehow built into your toolkit (whether your toolkit is a bunch of common libraries, or a framework, or just the knowledge in your head) then you are going to be more inclined to put them everywhere you can.

I was recently thinking through how to integrate some feeds and some Atom publishing entry points in a site I am working on and I arrived at what I suspect is already common knowledge: each new piece of metadata is a potential feed. So if you classify things by author, then there could be a feed per author. If you (also) have tags, there is a potential feed per tag, and so on. Even in places where I thought this didn't quite make sense, it ended up being useful. A feed per day or per permalink? Sure — it includes the article, plus any comments and updates. Not everybody may want such a feed, but it costs nothing to include it (if you're clever) and for those who might like to consume your data that way, why not help them out?

Coincidental confirmation that this kind of mapping is useful arrived yesterday evening: Dave not unreasonably called me out for not taking many photos of where I live. This led me to wonder what other people had done around here (home) and looked up the area via Flickr tags. Well, sure, there are some useful tags such as pc2077 and hornsby. There is also a feed on each of these pages so that I can track any updates. Obvious enough, but not every website does this and Flickr has enough rough edges that I was briefly surprised they'd got to this point. Nice one, Flickr.

Topics: technology/xml/atom, photography/flickr, technology/metadata, thinking

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