It happens when I open just ‘one-too-many’ tabs in Chrome. The desktop becomes unresponsive as the memory manager in Linux tries to find pages for Chrome to use for the new tab. Unfortunately, it’s so overcommitted the pages that it can’t find any. Every process wants to run and Linux essentially runs out of pages. Hence disk-thrashing starts, the desktop slows to a crawl or simply becomes unresponsive, and I try to Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a TTY so I can kill something (usually ‘killall chrome’).

I’d rather the box just didn’t allocate the memory if it doesn’t have it – i.e. don’t open the new tab if there isn’t memory for it.

My experiment is going to be to run for a few weeks using some sysctls of:

• vm.overcommit_memory = 2
• vm.overcommit_ratio = 120

This should give me a maximum commit of 8GB (4Gb swap and 4GB of memory). I wonder how it will go?

Useful information from:

• Linux Memory Overcommit
• How Linux handles virtual memory overcommit

Microsoft isn’t exactly known for it’s love affair with cross-platform technologies. If anything, they are the most anti-cross-platform technology provider there is. Windows and its eco-system is all that Microsoft is interested in; it’s where the bulk (nay all?) of its revenue is derived from.

Buying Skype for $8.5B is an interesting move. It’s roughly double what Google or Facebook were going to pay, if the rumours were true. Thus, Microsoft must believe that it will gain synergies (that horrible management/marketing word …) from integrating Skype technology (and brand?) into Windows in the Desktop, Server, Xbox and Windows Mobile world. It’s got a large fight on its hands with Cisco in the conferencing space and has been looking to make its Unified Communications solution really, really compelling. And maybe by adding Skype to the mix it will be compelling? But $8.5B compelling?

It’s hard to see how Microsoft is going to get its investment back. There could be some useful patents in the mix, and Microsoft is showing that it likes to throw patents around to interfere with markets and use legal tactics as competition rather that, say, just innovating and competing. However, keeping the technology away from Google et al. may also be part of there competitive strategy.

So there’s lots of interesting stuff in there. But for those of us who use Skype on Macs, Linux, Android, or anything that isn’t Windows, yesterday marks a turning point. Previous acquisitions by Microsoft that were cross-platform eventually became Windows only, with the other platforms left swinging in the breeze. What are we going to use instead? SIP, Google Voice, something else? Come on Google, sort out your Google Voice offering for the rest of the world …

Some context is probably required: The IET is a relatively large professional organisations serving mostly electrical and electronics engineers with a smattering of other technology people. There will, of course, be some networking that takes place within the confines of the Institution.

However, do I really want my activity stream to be confined in MyIET, rather than at identi.ca or twitter? No, is the honest answer, but I also think that what the IET have added to MyIET is symptomatic of a wider issue. Actually, I don’t really want it in twitter either, except that it has the network effect. I’d rather it was in identi.ca.

The issue is silos. MyIET is yet another social networking silo. If you put your data into the MyIET silo can you easily get it out? In this case, the answer is a resounding ‘no’. There doesn’t appear to be any options to export your status feed, comments or other data that you put into the site.

My ideal would be that my activity stream (or status updates) are held at a location of my choosing. They would probably be split into a number of categories, one of which might be IET related or business/professional related. And then I would configure the IET portal to pull my activity stream to it. Then, I would control the activity stream and what I do with it.

This is, of course, a federated social network. Oh, and OneSocialWeb are doing just that.

I’d like a new phone. Unfortunately, virtually every phone released these days running Android 2.2 (Froyo) also runs some kind of customised interface. Motorola has Motoblur, HTC has Sense, and who knows what Samsung has, but it isn’t stock Android. Is it so much to ask to have the stock Android experience? Apparently, it is.

I’ve seen rumours that Google is pushing handset makers to use stock Android 3.0 rather than put their own interface on it. Here’s hoping. So, since my phone is almost out of contract, I thought I’d root it (which voids the warranty), and put CyanogenMod 6 (CM6) on it, which is basically Android 2.2 (Froyo) with a few enhancements. CyanogenMod has done some incredible work and it is well worth checking out whether your Android phone is supported.

Now I was quite nervous about messing with my phone. It has some paid apps on it and I’ve spent 18 months with it, customising it to my requirements. However, I’d heard such great things about CM6 that I was really looking forward to it. And, I must say, it is so much better that 1.6. Seriously, if you have an HTC Magic, then just read through this post, read the linked sites, and go for it!

Now the following is specific to UK HTC Magic devices, but the links indicate what to do for other phones. The steps are:

1. Check your phone really is a HTC Magic Sapphire PVT32B
2. Root your phone
3. Backup your applications/data (although I could’ve missed out this step)
4. Backup your entire 1.6 stock ROM
5. Backup your whole SD Card
6. Install CM6
7. Install Google Apps (so you can get Market, GMail, etc.)
8. Re-configure the device for UK Vodafone
9. Re-install your Apps from Market (and restore your data if you need to).

Now, I don’t really keep any data on my phone that isn’t in the Cloud somewhere. It is either on Google, Dropbox, or I copy it off the SD Card and stick it on my laptop. However, you may need to do Step 9. “restore data” if you have kept a lot of data on the phone. I didn’t have to because I use Google for my mail, contacts, calendar, etc. which simplifies the process. This was a conscious decision about 6 months ago to simplify my life. But I do have automated backups of all my data on Google.

Assumptions

• You know how to mount/read your SD Card in your phone in your OS
• You don’t panic if things don’t go exactly according to plan. You might need to search forums if your experience doesn’t exactly match mine. I certainly had to because mine didn’t exactly match some of the other tutorials.
• This is not a tutorial; it is a summary of what I did to get my phone running CM6.
• It’ll be useful if you do this where you have WiFi because when you wipe the phone it will (temporarily) not have the settings to access data over 3G on the Vodafone network.  It’ll also be quicker!
• I may have forgotten a few items whilst writing this. I had the following unusual options enabled on the phone:

1. Settings->Applications: “Unknown Sources”: ticked
2. Settings->Applications->Development: “USB Debugging”: ticked

Step 1: Check your phone is the same as mine!

My phone is a UK spec Vodafone HTC Magic 32B with 192MB RAM. I verified this! In the USA this phone is also called a MyTouch 3G/ION.

To check your phone is the same as mine you need to reboot your phone into fastboot. Shut your phone down and then hold down the ‘Back’ button whilst switching the phone on. You’ll then get a display which has this on it:

SAPPHIRE PVT 32B SHIP S-ON G
HBOOT-1.33.0004 (SAPP10000)
CPLD-10
RADIO-2.22.19.26I
Apr 9 2009, 23:30:40

The key part is the ’32B’ above which I’ve highlighted. If you don’t have the same as mine then you’ll need to follow a ’32A’ or other set of instructions. (Thanks to Ralph Slooten for the idea on showing the fastboot).

Step 2: Root your phone

This is really simple.  Search market for Universal Androot. Install it and launch it. Press “Root ”.  After a short while your phone will be ‘rooted’, which means that applications can (with permission) access anything on the phone’s filesystem. This is important as you can’t install the other tools without.

Note that you will void your warranty on the phone by doing this. Mine’s so close to being out of contract (5 days), and I’ve had it 18 months, that this didn’t worry me. It might worry you though!

Step 3: Backup your applications/data

Now you’ve rooted your phone you can back everything up on it. Search for ‘Titanium backup‘ on the Market. Install it, and run it. It will ask for root privileges which you should allow and tick the box to always allow Titanium to have root privileges.

Then you need to click on the ‘Problems?‘ button and do the upgrade for BusyBox. If you don’t then Titanium Backup won’t work.

After that, use the ‘menu‘ button, select ‘Batch‘ and click the ‘Run‘ button next to “Backup all user apps + system data“. This will make a full backup of all your user applications (but not the current stock 1.6 ROM) and all the data on the phone to the SD Card.

Now mount your phone to your computer: plug in a USB cable, connect it to your handy laptop, wait a few seconds for your phone to recognise the link, pull down on the status bar and select the little USB symbol and connect it to your computer.  Then copy the TitaniumBackup folder off the SD Card onto your computer.

Step 4: Backup your entire 1.6 stock ROM

Next we make a complete backup of your current Stock 1.6 ROM, data, apps … basically everything. Get this right and you’ll be able to return your phone to its current state.

So why do Step 3 at all? Mostly because:

• I’m paranoid
• It’s a useful thing to do for the future too.

To do this step we will be using ROM Manager by the @koush. This really is an amazing piece of software and makes it very easy to try out custom ROMs.

I used this guide to perform the backup. Please go and read it for background information and to familiarise yourself with the screens. The essential steps are:

1. Install ROM Manager – search for it in Market.
2. IMPORTANT: Work with a fully charged phone.
3. Unplug the USB cable.
4. Install the Recovery Image using the top option in ROM Manager. The PVT 32B (i.e. the Vodafone UK HTC Magic) is known as a MyTouch 3G/ION to ROM Manager.  Do not select the “HTC Magic” option or you will flash the wrong recovery image.
5. Then select “Backup Current ROM”.
6. After the phone has rebooted and backed up the ROM, it will boot back into your normal stock Android 1.6.

Okay, now your current ROM is backed up to the SD Card.

Step 5: Backup your whole SD Card

I said I was paranoid didn’t I? There is a small chance that the SD Card will get corrupted when flashing a ROM so it’s prudent to back-up the SD Card:

1. Mount it on your laptop/computer.
2. Copy everything on the card.  I put it into a ZIP file.

This copies the current ROM you backed up in Step 4 onto your laptop/computer as well.

Step 6: Install CyanogenMod 6

Okay, finally you are reaching the exciting part, but I just want to make something clear:

This step involves wiping everything from your phone, just like a factory reset. The SD Card should be okay, but all your applications and data are going to be wiped from the phone. You will be able to restore your paid for apps from Market, but there won’t be a record of what you have installed.

I would (and did) at this point make a note of what apps I had installed so I could re-install them afterwards.

Next I read [Complete Guide] How To Flash A Custom ROM To Your Android Phone With ROM Manager + Full Backup & Restore.

Note: The stock Vodafone 1.6 Android seems to re-flash the recovery image to a stock image after each re-boot. This one caught me out. So you need to re-flash the recovery image after each reboot into the stock OS. The CyanogenMod ROMs (and other’s apparently) don’t do this.

Therefore, as we have already rebooted into 1.6 Android (to do the ROM back-up) we need to convince ROM Manager to re-flash the Clockworkmod recovery image. Unfortunately, at the time of writing the ROM Manager incorrectly reports that it is flashed: it isn’t and you can prove it by trying to reboot – you’ll end up with a large ‘!’ warning triangle on recovery boot (hold ‘home’ button when powering on).

To convince ROM Manager to reflash the clockworkmod recovery image, just scroll to the bottom of the ROM Manager app and install the aron_RA image. After that is installed, re-install the clockworkmod recovery image, but using the option at the top again. Now you are ready to flash the CM6.  (Thanks to this thread at clockworkmod forum.)

Now we pick up on the instructions at Upgrading from CyanogenMod 4.2 to CyanogenMod 5/6. We’re not really upgrading, but it works well.

If you bought the ROM Manager application you can probably browse for the ROM. I didn’t because I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. I am going to buy it now because it does such a great job and I want to support its development.

So this is how it is done manually:

1. On your laptop, download the latest (in my case CM6) ROM. This is the CM6 ROM in the section “CyanogenMod for the HTC Dream & Magic” on this page. The MD5SUM for the ROM I downloaded is: 35b6603227aea922c28284ef8d269015 and the filename is: update-cm-6.0.0-DS-signed.zip
2. Also download the tiny MDPI version of the Google Apps for CyanogenMod 6. Again the MD5SUM is d21e9a3597b7f03f9e623c8e5b9a9caf and the filename: gapps-mdpi-tiny-20100917-signed.zip
3. Next copy these two zip files over to your phone’s SD Card. Anywhere is fine, but I placed them in the top-level directory in the SD Card.
4. Ensure the phone is fully charged.
5. Disconnect it from the laptop – i.e. unplug the USB.
6. Run ROM Manager and select “Install ROM from SD Card” (see images on this helpful page!).  Select the update-cm-6.0.0-DS-signed.zip file.
7. Ensure you tick the “Wipe Data and Cache”.  There is no need to select/tick the “Backup Existing ROM” as you have already completed that step above.  Incidentally, the reason I split it was so that I could copy the backed up ROM off the device before flashing the new ROM.
8. Click “ok” and it should flash the ROM.

The phone will reboot into the recovery image, flash the new ROM, and then reboot again. It should now be running CM6.

Okay, now you have CM6, we still need to put the Google Apps on the device and get it back onto Vodafone.

Step 7: Install Google Apps

This is so you get Gmail, Market and the other Google Apps.

1. Run ROM Manager and select “Install ROM from SD Card”. This time select the gapps-mdpi-tiny-20100917-signed.zip file.
2. Ensure that neither of the two tick boxes are selected (“Wipe Data and Cache” nor “Backup Existing ROM”)
3. Click OK.
4. The phone will reboot and install Google Apps.

When the phone reboots this time it will go through the Google Apps set-up.

I have two Google Accounts that I wanted to use with the Phone. One is a Google Apps account (i.e. a paid for hosted account on Google for my domains), and the other is a typical googlemail/gmail account. As Market can only be used with your ‘regular’ Google account, I did the set-up with my regular account. This means that Market will recognise your paid apps.

The Froyo 2.2 Gmail, Calendar and Contacts programs are multi-account aware and can be configured with both the regular account and the Google Apps account. This essentially solved my problem with 1.6 (single accounts only).

So my recommendation is to set the phone up with your regular Google account and add the Google Apps account in the Accounts section. Note that Reader isn’t multi-account aware and will only work with the primary account on the device.

Step 8: Re-configure the device for UK Vodafone

Navigate to Settings->Wireless & networks->Mobile Networks->Network operators and select “vodafone UK”.

Then go back to Settings->Wireless & networks->Mobile Networks->Access Point Names and select “Vodafone UK Contract I…” (Internet).  i.e. ensure that it has the green dot next to it.

Your phone should now be able to go back onto 3G.

Step 9: Re-install your Apps

If you now go to Market, it should synchronise and show you your paid apps that you have previously bought on your primary Google Account.

As you have wiped all of the data on the phone (not the SD Card), you’ll either need to re-sync the data (all the Google Stuff), or restore it using Titanium. I’m just progressing through this now.

Other things I had to do

Some final, hopefully useful, things I had to do:

• I used ROM Managers ‘Fix Permissions’. It didn’t do any harm and I thought it would fix the next problem.
• My Google search widget on the home screen failed.  After Googling it, I discovered that it is a fairly common problem after reflashing a device.  Just delete it and put it on again and it should work.

And Finally …

Well that’s it. The recovery image being replaced on Stock 1.6 held me up for a bit and I had to do a load of reading to get it right. So far everything seems good on CM6; it’s seems faster, it is smoother and it has multi-account support.

I also must thank that amazing work of the CyanogenMod team, ROM Manager and all of the people testing these ROMs.  Without them we would be stuck on carrier or manufacturer ROMs with no hope of upgrade.

The following is a list of links that may prove useful to you:

• Full Update Guide – HTC Magic (32B)
• Universal Androot
• [Complete Guide] How To Flash A Custom ROM To Your Android Phone With ROM Manager + Full Backup & Restore
• [Complete Guide] How To Fully Back Up And Restore Your Android Phone Using Nandroid Backup
• ROM Manager
• Can’t Reboot into Recovery on MT3G w/ ClockworkMod 2.5.0.1
• Fastboot (a description)
• Rooting your HTC Magic Android Phone with CyanogenMod
• Titanium Backup
• HTC Magic page at Wikipedia
• CyanogenMod Wiki
• Android at Wikipedia

CONTENT You shall retain ownership rights in information or other content that you upload, post or otherwise transmit to or via your use of Twidroyd (“Submissions”); however, by making your Submissions through Twidroyd, you grant Licensor a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, reproduce, edit, translate, reformat, distribute, modify, transmit, prepare derivative works of, publicly display and produce the Submissions in connection with the enhancement of the Twidroyd service or otherwise in connection with Licensor’s business. You agree that these licenses include the right for the Company to make your Submissions available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such content use. Such additional uses by the Company, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Submissions. We may modify or adapt your Submissions in order to transmit, display or distribute it over computer networks and in various media and/or make changes to your Submissions as are necessary to conform and adapt that content to any requirements or limitations of any networks, devices, services or media.

This is a bit like Microsoft saying, “If you use Word to write something then you grant us a license to it.”  Or Bic saying if you use their biros then they get a license.  Or perhaps your paper manufacturer.

It’s also really sneaky.  They don’t do it upfront and tell you that they want this right; they hide it in a EULA and in the Terms and Conditions.

So, this was happened when they were bought by Tweetup?  So let’s look at their Terms. Sure enough, hidden in their Terms is:

You agree that these licenses include the right for the Company to make your Submissions and, if applicable, User Content, available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such content use.

Again they are hiding this.  I guess they want to use all the ‘tweets’ to try and sell them or the intelligence/analysis that they contain.  And they are a commercial company and so want to make money.  I have no problem with that.  My problem is that they aren’t being upfront about it.  And I guess they aren’t being upfront about it because they suspect that most people don’t really like the idea that their stuff (even if it has no individual value) is being sold.

Perhaps we should start paying for these services and really know what is happening to our data, rather than thinking everything is for free, and thus effectively forcing companies to do this type of thing?

Now I just need to find an alternative.  And ideas?

Don’t get me wrong; I think Alexander Hanff does great work campaigning on privacy issues.  I just wonder if, in this case, he’s seeing stuff that simply isn’t there.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Googlegate is about Google collecting un-encrypted WiFi data whilst roaming the streets with their StreetView project. Apparently, according to Privacy International et al., they have been doing this with criminal intent to record the bits of data intentionally so that they can find out more about us.

It appears that, whilst driving along, the software listened for WiFi broadcasts, discarded ALL those that were encrypted, and stored the packets, in entirety, of those that were not encrypted. This, according to conspiracy theory, means they knew that they couldn’t use the encrypted ones, and therefore were intentionally storing the unencrypted ones, even though they could have got the SSID from the encrypted WiFi broadcasts. This is the smoking gun.

Personally, I have no idea what Google were thinking, but I’m going to hazard some guesses.

WiFi access points. What kind are generally encrypted and what kind are generally open? Most home routers supplied by networks to consumers in the last few years are almost always encrypted now. If you buy off the shelf then you have to make a choice on whether to encrypt. Every Starbucks, hotel, cafe, airport, and other public access WiFi is unencrypted. Unencrypted WiFi seems like an invitation to join it, doesn’t it? It’s providing a service that you can connect to.

If I was writing software I’d probably make the decision that if anybody bothers to encrypt their WiFi then they probably don’t want their SSID used either. Hence I’d discard those packets. Also, for my roving software, to keep it simple, I’d probably just store the whole packet and pull out the SSID later during analysis. Storage is cheap. It’s easier to do, and you’d want your 24/7 software to be simple just so that it stands a better chance of not crashing. And, if it’s simpler, then it’s quicker and cheaper to write and test. Particularly if the brief is: “collect the SSIDs and geolocations of unencrypted WiFi stations”.

Why collect the SSIDs in the first place? Android phones and location services. It seems to me that it’s simply about better location services and getting more accuracy. Cell towers + SSIDs helps to place you on the map.

Should Google be collecting all this data in secret? No, I don’t think so. Are they an evil company? No, I doubt that too. Are they a large (huge?) organisation intent on making a profit? Damn right, and that’s something we should worry about. Have they got a good privacy record? Not really, especially after the Buzz debacle. Should we watch them like a hawk? Definitely. Was Google stupid? Without a doubt. But are they criminal?

My wife talks about ‘cock-up or conspiracy’. It’s a bit like ‘never attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity’. I think Google cocked up, not that it was some conspiracy to collect our WiFi transmissions and analyse them. Still, paranoid people tend to see conspiracies everywhere.

But then Gmail arrived, in beta, and, for me, changed the game.  And now with spam levels rising ever higher, I’ve finally reached the point where my poor little virtual server isn’t powerful enough to deal with all the spam that comes with mail domains I have since 1999.

These posts are about a journey that I’m going to make in transitioning from my own server to a Google Apps Mail account.  On the way I have to:

• move about 7GB+ of mail that is sorted into lots of different folders
• back up the mail from Google every day using an IMAP sync tool
• migrate 6 different domains so that I can receive and send on those different domains
• move my wife’s accounts and domains as well

And all without losing any mail on the way.  Or at least finding out I’ve lost mail on the way.

Why Google Apps Mail?  I’m driven by the nice user interface, tagging, searching and the fact it will just work on my Android phone.

It’s going to be a three step process:

1. Move spam processing off the server
2. Forward mail to Google from the existing mail mail server
3. Change the MX records to move them to Google.

This still means that I can change back to my own (or other server) at some time in the future.  Probably that move will happen when we can have the ability to easily run email server appliances in the cloud.  Until my decentralised dream becomes a reality I’ll go with Google.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting opinion piece on the iPad recently over at BoingBoing about why you shouldn’t buy and iPad.  I found it via Slashdot, where many of these articles tend to get mentioned.  Many people have already commented on his post, analysing his position, arguments and thoughts;  I’m not going to – just Google and read a selection.  But it did set me thinking about Apple and their impact on how they are guiding consumers to view technology.

Those that know me, know that I avoid Microsoft wherever possible, will never buy from Sony, and I am coming to the same position on Apple.  I’ll kick off by quoting Doc Searls  from his “Prisons vs. Horizons” EOF page in the May 2010 Linux Journal:

“… the iPhone is a silo that stands on one company’s closed OS and hardware. It is equipped with a slick SDK, rules galore about how products should run and developers behave, and a single retail sphincter – the iTunes ‘store’ …”

If you own an iPhone or iPad you have precisely one place where you can get your apps: the iTunes store.  That’s it. There is no where else that you can get an App and install it on your device.  And Apple has absolute control over what goes into that store.  And, it seems, it has a pretty arbitrary decision making process for allowing apps into the store.

Several things are fairly well known:

1. If the App competes with something from Apple, then you won’t find that App.
2. If it is digital content then you can only buy it from Apple.  i.e. music, books or just about anything else.
3. If Apple decides they don’t like it then you aren’t going to find it.  Witness Steve Job’s latest outburst: Want Porn? Buy an Android Phone, Steve Jobs Says

Now, I’m not saying that you should go out an buy porn, but to have Apple dictate that you can’t have it, and shouldn’t have it?  It’s like Disneyland as Ed Felton at Freedom to Tinker wrote about.

It does not matter how good Apple products are if you, as the user, are not free to do what you want with it.  Yes they are nice shiny boxes. Yes, it’s a lovely Disney experience. But there just isn’t enough control left in the hands of me, the user.

To me, Apple with the iPhone and iPad are the AOL, Compuserve, and MSN of the Internet era: walled gardens, silos or prisons where everything is controlled by one entity.

Apple, for the consumer, is about a choice: as a user of the iPhone/iPad/etc., you have Apple dictate what you can do with the device, what apps you can use, where you can buy your content and even whether you can have Flash applications or not.

If that’s the choice, I think I’m going to choose something else.

Well software source control or version control systems.  I tend to use two: subversion and git.  Actually, I tend to use git whenever I can including when I have to use subversion. git svn is, in US terms, awesum.  One debate I have had on and off is whether to:

• Do development on trunk and put releases in branches — OR
• Do development on branches, merge to trunk, and tag releases (or put them in their own branches).

I’ve previously done the former, but I’m rapidly shifting to the latter.  My rather simple reasoning is that I want trunk/master to be, to all intents and purposes, a working copy of the latest software.  i.e. the software that is in trunk/master passes its tests, builds and basically does what it says it should on the tin.  The developing software is done on a branch and only merged back to trunk/master when it passes its tests.  Thus the process is:

1. Branch
2. Develop & test
3. Merge from trunk/master to the branch (i.e. pull any updates)
4. Test, test, test
5. Review code with buddy, senior dev, etc. (depending on your set-up)
6. Merge back into trunk as a finished feature.

Even better, only work on code that is actually described in a ticket, bug, or on something like pivotal.  That way you stay focussed and only spend time on developing features/fixing bugs that the ‘customer’ actually wants.

The only question then is what you do with releases?  My initial guess is to tag them as a release on trunk/master.   Then if you get a bug and have to maintain the old release then to branch at that point and maintain the release as its own ‘master’ release branch.

I also arrived for the GTi breakfast event at 7.30am which I felt was quite an achievement because I didn’t go to bed until 11.30 the night before which brings me back to the first day of TDC.

Day 1 was very good with only a couple of ‘blooper’ presentations.  The highlights for me were:

Harry Drmec, Former CEO of Red Bull.  A drinks company CEO at a digital event?  Yes, and it worked very well.  The guy leaked of leadership and capability and this is of course reflected in his amazing work at Red Bull.  I particularly liked his story of how he stood up to Tesco and won.

Mike Southon, who did an inspirational talk about entrepreneurship using the Beatles (as in the Group) as a metaphor or simile.  It was great and the use of music and old b/w photos of the Beatles helped hammer his points home.

Dan Lyons (a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs) who, after a shaky start, pulled off an amusing and informative talk.

But the outstanding session for me on Day 1 was the final session entitled “Stop Making Sense”:

Dr Michael Shermer took us on a tour of skeptism, gullableness, its biological and evolutionary roots and some techniques to combat the category errors that we all make when faced with the unknown.  Essentially, how to ensure that we address the unknown with “we don’t know” rather than attributing it to some supernatural entity or God.  Preaching to the converted for sure, but still a timely and funny reminder of how our biology and sensing systems can trick our brains into believing things that simply aren’t there.

Then, completely unexpectedly, Chandler Burr, a Perfume critic at the New York Times, gave an exhilerating tour of scent culminating in an exploration of the structure (and smells) of a boutique fragrance called “Silver Mark”.  A simply stunning perfume and a delightful speaker who is clearly massively enthusiastic about scents, the sense of smell, and the way in which they can be manipulated to produce emotional responses to, well, scent.  Who Knew, huh?

But the star of the show was an independent toy designer called Caleb Chung.  He designed the Furby which, we were told, sold 50 Billion.  That’s about 7 Furbys for every single person on the planet!  Who was buying those things.  More to the point, who bought my seven and probably your seven?

Mr Chung then went on to demonstrate his new toy which was the Pleo from Ugobe.  An amazing robotic toy which had real lifelike attributes – basically it is a very cute toy which evokes empathy.  Pleo is a learning robot and reacts to how you treat it – and it’s aimed at kids!