Now I had considered writing a detailed article here on how I’d see my daily life working with technology.  But shortly after considering this glimmer of an idea I began to realise this can become far more complicated than you, or at least I, can imagine.  The way technology integrates into our lives is so evasive and so demanding of function that even the smallest of design problems poses a level of clarity that hard to conjuncture.

So while keeping the essence of my original title, I think my one journey will be segmented into a number of articles.  Break off a lump of chocolate, savour its chocolaty goodness, sit back and relax.  My day, this day, starts with an alarm clock.

Beep beep be beep.
Beep beep be beep.

Ugh, the sound of an alarm clock is a Pavlovian condition we all loathe.  The effort of pulling oneself out of bed and the game we play, man versus clock on who’s going to buckle first; the insult is only magnified if it’s the weekend or we change time zone on travel and time itself becomes screwed up.

Surely there’s a way to do things better?

And here in comes the first paradox of design.  The more complexity you introduce into a system the more prone to failure it will be.  A simple alarm clock is annoying if you forget to set it, but equally annoying is an automatic alarm clock when a failure beyond your control is introduced.

Approaches to reducing failure while maintaining complexity include planning, engineering, formal methodology; all are fallible and just mean we're altering the angle of that line (hopefully down).  The most important concept for me to consider is however, understanding.  We aim for such a goal by considering all the elements needed to make something and refine the design and ideas down to level where the complexity is manageable, our understanding better and (hopefully) the level of failure is acceptable.

So lets start with the basics; what is an alarm clock and what are the most important things we want it to do?

Properties of an alarm clock: (attempt #1 - known requirements)

1. Easy to set / unset / snooze / turn off
2. Pleasant to wake-up with
3. Isn’t evaded by me *over snoozing*
4. Doesn’t bother me when I’m not sleeping
5. Doesn’t wake me when I want to sleep:
   a)    Doesn’t ring at weekends
   b)    Understands personal and public holidays
   c)    Knows that irrespective of the current time or zone I ALWAYS mean local time

There, that wasn’t hard.  Unfortunately we’ve not even come close to having a usable product yet.  The eco-system can grow oh so quickly if you consider point [5] in any detail.  It would need calendar engagements, accuracy of information, geographic location.  Just consider how aware your clock needs to be.  Blink and you’ll have designed the world’s most complex smart phone.  How do we approach this problem and refine our understanding of the design?

It's not that requirements are a bad idea either, there are perfectly reasonable starting point.  Put stakes in the ground and work from there.  But requirements also rarely describe how you might solve a problem in a level of detail that allows you to distinguish a bad product from a good one or a simple problem from a complex one.  It's important to take those requirements and evolve them; for this reason I'm calling our product requirements properties of the product.

It's a subtle difference but I think an important one in design.  Properties of a product are easily changed by the design process; requirements feel somewhat immovable.  To make a great product, you need to be prepared to change things and understand why you're making those changes.

Skipping back a little, I think my ideal clock would however be a smart phone (herein, called just a phone).  It needs such intrinsic integration into my daily life I couldn’t see how else it would work if it wasn’t a phone.  And that's the key, imagining how you'd use a product, how other people would use it; working out exactly who those people are and how they behave.  You might not know it, but that's a key principle in Interaction Design and how to make better products.

But for now, and for simplicity, I'm going to consider the product is made for me.  As such, instead of a functional list of requirements I'm going to consider my desires and how I'd use such an alarm clock (remember its a phone now).

Properties of an alarm clock: (attempt #2 - desire)

1. Home screen changes to night mode when getting late and offers me:
   a.    Skip alarm for next day; or set if a non-alarm day
   b.    Nudge alarm time forward/back, but only for the next day
   c.    Warn if I would break an appointment (and considers my dressing time)
   d.    Nice cup of coco, tuck-up in bed, quick check on the time, and a bedtime story
   e.    Fades to night and sleeps, all calendar alarms on silent, all non-urgent calls to busy
2. Alarm randomly fades in light music from my collection
3. Snoozes if I say "Shhhh" or pick it up or move it
   
4. Alarm turns off once snoozed if I move a ball through a simple maze (i.e. I’m awake)
5. Never sounds the alarm if I move the phone before the first alarm in the last hour
6. Comes out of night mode [1.e.] when it knows I’m awake

Now we’re getting somewhere.  Not sure how we’d achieve all that, but I’m beginning to feel my alarm clock is working for me, rather than waking my like my mother when I was a teenager.

We’ve shifted from how I think an alarm clock should work (attempt #1's requirements) to how I think I’d like to use an alarm clock (attempt #2's desires).  By evolving our thoughts on how we want to achieve a task, or use a piece of technology we begin to get answers to problems we didn’t even know we were facing.  For example, by looking at [2] I might decide that the music tastes need to get more aggressive the more I snooze.  [4] may give me a brain-training puzzle and [5] needs more consideration as could it result in missed alarm calls.

Most importantly though, this is cheap development.

We're not building prototypes or creating code to see if things work, we're just rationalising and imagining how we'd use something in greater and greater detail.  As we refine our concept the complexity falls away naturally to the point things are workable, usable and practical.  There are also other tricks based around this principle that mean we can improve a design without writing code or building anything, but let's keep things simple for now; we have a workable alarm clock.

This however is one small point in my day.  We’ve not even started our journey.  Heck, we’ve only just woken up; more to see, more to do, and more to read in the next part of this series.

:-J

I'm a regular commuter through Cambridge, and if there's one thing you can say about the city, it's we like our bikes.  Sometimes I cycle the 8.5 miles in from home and sometimes I drive.  In essence you can call me both a cyclist and a driver (is that a cyver or a drilist?).

In my travels though, I consistently see an appalling view of other road users to traffic laws.  Whether cyclists or drivers they each have their own oddities or interpretations.

Cyclists for example see red lights as a serving suggestion and amble across any junction they choose assuming no cars coming means the law doesn't apply.  Then there's pavements (sidewalks) which mix up pedestrians and cyclists in random proportions.  The City Council doesn't help, as they chuck inconsistent signs at the problem; some places you can and some you can't cycle.

When you can't, again, you're breaking the law.

The daft thing is that cycling on the pavement isn't the most pleasant experience, particularly when raining.  The drainage is poor and you spend your time either skipping puddles or avoiding cars reversing out of drive-ways.  The road however is 100% legal to ride, perfectly drained and often a lot faster to ride on.

What about cars?  Well, I certainly see creative interpretations of running amber lights, but also U-turns in main roads when the previous junction said no right turn.  Cars stopping over keep clear areas so people can't turn out and blinkerism where when someone cuts up a cyclist they then completely ignore you; even if as a cyclist you had right of way.  My favourite is being over taken in an urban city road when you're doing the speed limit; I find that insulting given I didn't set the limit I'm obeying.

Incidentally, all these events I've just documented can happen in ONE DAY.  I see this consistently and a lot.

My point is that both are as bad as each other.  I'm sure I'm not perfect either, but at least I'm aware of these things and try to avoid doing them.  I rarely ride a pavement on a bike and stop for every red light (much to the annoyance of other cyclists).

I have an idea.  Every time a cyclist sees a car make a traffic violation they should slap the car's roof.  Every time a car sees a cyclist do something similar they should sound their horn.  Granted, the whole of Cambridge may just echo to the sound of twangs and honks, but if you don't make people aware and there's insufficient policing where do you go?

You could argue that an unpoliced law is therefore dissolving away, or you could argue that the law was placed there for the safety of everyone.

Either way, I want to see more honking and twanging.

:-J

Four years ago I was on a train that blew up.

When I heard the explosion it didn’t sound any different from the sounds a tube train normally makes.  The sound of grinding metal and the carriage shakes aren’t unusual; but this got out of hand quite quickly.

A second shake was accompanied by a woman’s scream and then everything lurched.  The train was trying to emergency stop but the bomb, directly or indirectly, seemed to have blown the train off the tracks; we therefore road over the debris of the explosion attempting to stop.

I remember feeling it as wheel after wheel hit an obstruction with almighty bangs.  Every boom threw the carriages in the air and every landing threw up impenetrable black soot; a wall so thick that I could see it coming to hit me like a wave.

I winced in those final micro seconds of a crash.  This was probably going to hurt.

We all ended up lying on the floor, choking for air and sipping that strange inch of clearer stuff that rests underneath a cloud of smoke and soot. I could hear a range of sounds.  The fire suppression system was stating the obvious with a beeping alarm.  People were coughing / choking and others were pounding on doors and windows trying to break them and breathe.

I could hear people sobbing quietly, scared and confused too, but what of me?  My emotions were mixed.  There was a part of me that felt like a caged wild animal.  It felt like the tunnel had caved in and there was no escape.  At that point it felt like death.  That feeling you get in your stomach when a loved one dies.  You know the inevitability and that you can’t turn back time.  Somehow your body is trying to will back what you’d lost.

That’s a hard feeling to deal with, and for me the only way to cope with such a feeling is to do something about it.  I crawled down the carriage to the interconnecting door.  I needed air and I needed escape.  When I looked up, I saw a very simple thing.  A small gap between the two carriages and another over the roof; although barely twelve inches, it felt like a space I could crawl through and be my escape.

A funny thing happened after that.  I didn’t worry, panic or care about the situation anymore.  That simple piece of information was enough to switch my brain into its rational state and deal with everything.

The rest of what happened on that day has been clearly documented.  Shortly after getting out I blogged a series of pieces that went global; my website shot up into the 60k most popular in the world and every media outlet tried to dive on the story.  I stonewalled radio / TV and entertained written journalists in the vain hope of getting my point across on terrorism.  Some material I wrote is now used for training victim councillors, which is at least a positive.

On that day though, all I thought about was everyone’s safety, fire and making sure I didn’t make a bad situation worse.  In appraisal there was little I did to either help or hinder.  Nothing I could do; although years on, even now, my brain constantly rationalises that day and whether I could do more than I did.  The one little thing of help was me finding air for my carriage and allowing people to breathe again.  It was so little, it was all so helpless and what happened, all so worthless.

My brain can’t do anything but echo it over and over again.  Flipping between scenarios and outcomes.  Choices and decisions.

To this day I still see the faces of two men who we helped off the train.  Both didn’t have a single piece of visible flesh left on their faces; torn from the blast all that was left was thick red blood.  They held their shirts as dressings over bigger bleeds.  Turning they said to us, “Is it bad?”  What could you answer? “No, you’ll be fine.”

It left me with a sense of leaving a place where people were dying, that emergency services couldn’t get their head around the problem and that, as someone involved, no-one would take me seriously when trying to communicate.  It’s all quite disheartening; the mix between doing what you’re told for the greater good and needing to do more.

So I look at the good I saw on the day and the humour instead.  The humanity of the shocked passengers on next train I took out of Paddington immediately afterwards.  They’d pieced together what had happened from my phone calls and immediately leapt in to offer whatever help they could.  Or how I quipped with my fellow tube dwellers when trapped, that it was a maintenance failure in the train, and how could Britain ever host the Olympics we’d won the bid for the day before?

You’d have thought such an event would have changed my life but I’m sorry to say that in the end it really hasn’t.  My view on life remains as it always has; where ever there’s inhumanity you’ll find humanity.  From horror you’ll find compassion.  I certainly believe that as I bump into people through life.

Indeed my view of blogging, the internet and more importantly social networking is the crux of how such horrors are undermined and become worthless.  The point of a few crazy people or even the statistical anonymity and tragedy of death is lost over time; a sad but important truth.

What really counts is change; how to keep the humanity without that horror.  I think social networking provides this key.  It gives us the communication routes to understand other points of view, or rant and be corrected, or change our own view of the world.  In a way, this is the how we remove violence and oppression from the world; not through regulation, laws and legislation.

I’ve thought hard about how to express those thoughts within a simple phrase; an echo for the planet to repeat.  What I came up with I think is succinct enough to express everything I’ve written and believe.  If anything makes a difference it’s this:

World Peace.  World Communication.  World Wide Web.

:J

The Apple iPod and iPhone's are sneaky beasts.  When you plug in USB they appear on your PC, but not in a standard way; rather in a semi-standard way.  They exploit a feature of USB that Windows doesn't touch; the ability to change configurations.  Or to put it another way, how the device appears when plugged in.  When you install Apple software the magic happens, but until then they appear as a locked-up camera.

In my day job we craft Ultra Wideband products and commonly Wireless USB.  This is a great technology for removing USB cables and the type of things we do are the wireless versions of hubs.  Very small pieces of silicon that the things you plug into them (or integrate them with) don't even know exist.  They continue to see the world as wired even though wireless.

So I decided to have a poke around with the Apple iPod Touch and iPhone.  It's useful to see how such devices behave to ensure they're conforming to the USB standard and don't throw any curved balls at the type of work we do.  What I discovered is that a basic iPod Touch or iPhone exposes the follow configurations (when tickled correctly in Windows):

• PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol)
• Mic-In + HID - using standard UAA USB Audio
• PTP + Apple vendor specific protocol
• CDC ECM (Tethering) - if an iPhone*

Mic-In is a particularly interesting one as it's how you can create an all-digital speaker connection from a device.  Remember, the iPod / iPhone is a device that communicates with a host rather than the otherway round.  This means that when you play tracks, that sound is sent to a host as if that host is connected to a microphone.  The interface therefore appears backwards until you consider the point-of-view and what's being achieved.  I presume the HID interface also available in the configuration is to allow remote control of the iPod / iPhone; perfect for when plugged into a car's audio system.

Additionally you can bring up DFU (Device Firmware Update) using this rune:

• Power down iPod / iPhone
• Hold Power + Home until Apple logo appears
• Stop pressing Power but continue pressing Home

Not the easiest of activation methods I grant you.  The challenge in our technical world is how to use these various interfaces to control the iPod / iPhone.

Palm's solution to the problem was quite ingenious and probably down to the Apple iPhone team that leaked over to Palm.  They emulate the Apple's private iTunes protocol.  Palm Prè's plug into a PC and just appear to iTunes as an Apple device.  Sneaky, clever and it means that you don't need to do much as a user.  Unfortunately you get a lot publicity seeking lawsuits and counter measures by Apple to try and knock you off your pedestal, so I watch how this strategy pans out.

Until then I'll watch them shoot it out and contrinue to rake over the iPod and iPhone products for gems and secrets.

:-J

*okay - I'm guessing, I don't have an iPhone or a victim iPhone so that's an educated guess.

Well howdy ya'all and welcome to my new site.

I have to say it's literally been years since I last had this working.  A major upgrade last year to a Quad system meant it was just too painful to get everything working again.  IIS went to version 7.0 and everything I had using ForestBlog just broke thanks to MySQL being annoying, technical and hard to port.

So I'm now back and sorting out the place.  I guess we'll see what happens and how things progress this time round.

:-J