Apparently, said buskers have to audition for a place in the city so that they can play! This is to ensure that they are up to scratch and fit with the city.

I’m frankly astonished that councils would have a busking policy, auditioning buskers, probably having an council officer administer the policy and then having various people checking that buskers have a license. What a waste of money. Let the market decide. Bad buskers will not get any money and move on. Good ones will earn money and stay. The public can decide.

Thankfully, Newcastle upon Tyne has a sensible attitude; apparently, it doesn’t believe that busking is something that should be licensed.

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.

T5 Experience for Transit Passengers

My wife and I got off the plane at 6.45 am on Sunday morning.  After queuing and being checked for over an hour we finally made it into the Terminal ‘proper’ at around 8.00 am.  That’s an hour and a quarter to clear immigration.

There were four queues to negotiate when getting off the plane at T5. They all took place in a hot, airless, basement of the terminal.  Not very welcoming to foreign passengers.

• The first queue was to actually get into the hall where we had our boarding card checked. Essentially, we were transit passengers.  This queue split us into UK passports and everybody else. Luckily, our UK passport queue seemed shorter than everybody else – god knows how long they had to wait.
• The next (for us) fairly short queue was to get our passports checked. Everybody else seemed to have very long additional waits to get their passports checked.
• The third queue was to get our pictures taken.   This took a LONG time. I wonder how long they keep the pictures.  Knowing the previous Labour government, probably ‘forever’ is the retention time.
• The fourth, final, tedious, queue was to get our hand luggage scanned. Luckily we weren’t the lucky few who got a very, very personal pat down from the security staff.

And all this took over an hour.  It is was also staffed by grumpy, bored, unsmiling security staff who treated is like cattle to be processed.  And the joke is: we paid for this as part of our plane ticket price.  We were the customer.  You’d never know it.

We were finally ejected from the security circus into a shopping centre. Not a calm place where you can relax between flights or before setting off on your first one. Nope. An incredibly busy, over bright, shiny, steel and glass edifice with widely spaced shops and hardly any seats. A place where the restaurants are not grouped in one place, but are scattered to the four corners of the Terminal. Choosing a restaurant means walking the entire length of the terminal, passing the oh-so-important shops of course.

After waiting over an hour in the queues, we also needed to use the toilets. Considering the sheer quantity of people that were stuffed into T5 it was a surprise that there weren’t more toilets. There were long queues at both the ladies and gents toilets. This is the first time I have experienced that at an airport here or abroad. You’d think that, when designing a terminal, you would get something as basic as the number of toilets for the expected number of people in the terminal.

Leaving the terminal to get on to a plane was also tedious. We were checked twice at the gate and again stood in a slow moving queue. The main culprit this time was having our photo checked. Then we had our boarding cards checked before getting onto the plane.

Finally, because Heathrow was so busy, after pushing back from the terminal, the plane was still trundling around the airport 30 minutes later before finally taking off 20 minutes late. Normal day at Heathrow I suppose.

Design Goals for Terminal 5

It’s not entirely clear what the design goals for T5 were but the outcome for us was not a particularly pleasant customer experience. It feels less like an airport terminal and more like a shopping centre which happens to have air passengers in it. Maybe BAA were more concerned with maximising revenue per passenger and less concerned with comfort, relaxation or a calm, friendly, passenger experience?

I’m going to compare Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam with Heathrow because I have had experience with both. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. They are so different that the only thing they seem to have in common is that they are both called ‘terminals’. Being in transit at Schiphol goes roughly like this.

1. Get off plane
2. Walk for 5 minutes or so to the centre of the terminal.
3. Make a choice in whether to eat, shop or relax.
4. Go to the appropriate zone
5. When ready to the gate
6. Be checked at the gate which includes the baggage check, passport check and boarding card.  This doesn’t seem to take very long at all.
7. Get on plane and depart.  From push back you are in the air within 10 minutes.

Each airports apparent attitude to security and their passengers results in very different passenger experiences. Whereas Heathrow is completely paranoid about security, Schiphol, to me, seems more pragmatic. Heathrow tries very, very hard to ensure everybody in the terminal has been checked before you get in.  At Schiphol they check you just before you get on the plane.

One of the problems with Heathrow seems to be the requirement to photograph everybody coming into the terminal and then check it on the way out. The results in delays and long queues aside from being an invasion of privacy. The overly paranoid security policy at the airport creates the rest of the delays. Besides, it’s theatre; Bruce Schneier has a lot to say on this.

T5 wants passengers to shop ’till they drop? Schiphol thinks it’s optional. T5 doesn’t want you sitting down? Schiphol provides relaxation couches around the airport. T5 makes you walk past shops whilst trying to choose where to eat. Schiphol puts them all in the same place. And Schiphol never seems to have queues in their toilets.

In summary

Heathrow T5 fails because it is designed with lots of security theatre and as a shopping centre. That’s the security processes that make us feel safe without actually doing anything about security. Long delays and miserable, bored and unfriendly security staff aren’t going to make passengers feel welcome. The apparent emphasis on extracting cash from travellers rather than giving them somewhere to relax isn’t going to help either.

I’m going to avoid Heathrow T5, which also sadly means British Airways, in future.

I had the ‘pleasure’ of travelling through Heathrow T5 twice during my holiday to Thonon les Bains on Lac Leman which is reached via Geneva.  On paper, the flights look fine; catch the BA plane to Heathrow, two hours at Heathrow and then catch your onward flight to Geneva.  On the return journey, three hours are offered at Heathrow – little did I know it was to clear security.

On the way out to Geneva, the plane was delayed by nearly an hour waiting at the gate.  However, desipte a 2 hour transfer time (not including the extra delay) our bags failed to make the connection from Newcastle and didn’t travel with us.  That’s everybody who flew from Newcastle to Geneva, six in total; not one of us was joined by our bags on the flight.  The bags did eventually turn up on the next flight and were delivered to us after a 5 hour delay. The baggage company at Geneva were not surprised; it seems that bags are far more frequently delayed from T5 than any other airport in the developed world.

However, it only got worse on the way back.  First we were delayed in Geneva because there was no slot available at Heathrow.  Then, even when we were given a slot at Heathrow, when the plane arrived at the airport’s airspace we were delayed again.

Then the plane was parked away from the terminal as there were no stands available.  Normally buses await to take the passengers to the terminal.  Except there weren’t any.  For 30 minutes.   None of the ground staff seemed to have any sense of urgency.  The bus driver even seemed to wait with the bus full despite several panicked American passengers on short transfers – they didn’t stand a chance with T5.  But when we were finally delivered to the terminal the fun really began.  We didn’t get to the T5 shopping centre for another 30 minutes.

Queues seem to be the norm at T5.  Firstly, there was a ludicrous queue after getting to T5.  It transpired that at the head of this queue was a small woman asking people whether they were transferring to local or international flights.  She was completely pointless because the hall immediately behind her was full of signs directing you where to go if you were transferring to a local or international flight.  She had no purpose whatsoever.  Utterly unbelievable and the first 10 minutes of waiting.

Next we queued to have our boarding passes checked.  After that another queue to have our passports checked.  Finally, both the local and international passengers were shepherded to yet another security check.  Together.  Why we were split up into different queues is anybodies guess as both the national and international passengers had boarding card and passport checks.  The final security check is the one where you take your belt off, take your laptop out, etc.  This took another 15 to 20 minutes.  Why?  Why?  Because the staff were just slow.  Inept too, probably, but generally very, very slow at staring at the computer monitor that displays the innards of cases, jackets, purses and other assorted bags. Incredibly slow.  In Newcastle this queue usually takes about 5 minutes.  The queue for our machine was on 10 or so people long yet took nearly 20 minutes …  I dispaired.

All told from the moment of touching down to getting into T5 took over an hour; it would have been 30-40 minutes at best even if we had got to a stand.  What a disgraceful way of treating people arriving at supposedly the most advanced passenger terminal in the world.  I imagine the American passengers on short transfers missed their flights.  There bags almost certainly will have done.

However, once in T5 proper you understand that it isn’t for passengers to relax waiting for their flight.  No, it’s only purpose is to extract money; it’s simply a glorified shopping mall.  All we wanted to do was get some lunch and then find somewhere comfortable for our next flight.  Instead, there are precious few places to eat and virtually no where to actually sit.  Unless you have an executive lounge pass that is.  T5, which because of its size, should feel spacious, yet feels claustrophobic, cluttered, noisy and generally unpleasant.

Even when we boarded our flight to Newcastle the madness of Heathrow didn’t end.  We ended up staying a further hour at the stand and taxiing before we finally took off.  Because they are operating at full capacity.

That seems to be the problem.  There are simply too many passengers.  They don’t need another runway; they need less passengers.  The current ‘systems’ at T5 don’t seem to be able to cope.  Most of the staff have a ‘learned helplessness’ air around them.

Heathrow needs proper competition.  Maybe BAA needs to be broken up so that Gatwick and Stansted can offer real competition to Heathrow to force it to buck its ideas up and provide a proper service to its passengers.  The security theatre is a joke; I don’t feel more secure, just that I’m having my time wasted.  We are paying customers; yet we pay to be treated like cattle.  I’m not sure why we put up with it.  Yet another reason for competition, but perhaps in a different way.  If there was an airport that didn’t treat you like cattle and actually treated you like paying customers then I would definitely fly through there, even if it was a bit more expensive.

BAA is bad for Heathrow and bad for British Airways.  The sooner it is broken up the better.

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!

After all, you don’t need a passport to take the train to Bristol. Or a coach, for that matter. And I’ve never needed a passport to drive my car to Bristol. This is inside this country. These are internal flights. Next time you travel inside the country and have to show your passport, ask yourself why?

PS I know people are going to say “Because they mix International and Internal passengers.” I don’t care about that; they also check your boarding card and passport at the gate before you get on the plane.

I took the train to Wolverhampton, as it seemed the easiest way to get there. Cross Country Trains is now the operator as Virgin seemed to have lost it. I went 1st Class down; I wish I’d managed to on the way back. I’m not sure which was worse; the chatty woman for half the journey, the fat man with huge elbows on the other half, or just that the seats were too narrow and like pieces of wood. I’ll not travel standard class again on National Cross Country Rail. Also their website doesn’t appear to work very well in Firefox 2.0 on Linux.

Incidentally, the trains must be a pretty good implementations of a Faraday cage because neither my O2 data card, nor the Neo FreeRunner, nor the Nokia 6310i was getting much of a signal at all. And there is no WiFi available on the train which limits connectivity somewhat. Maybe this is a quiet train?

The venue was the Lighthouse Media Centre which occupies the old Chubb factory in Wolverhampton. I never knew Chubb (the lock people) were based there. It’s a large Victorian venue, red brick, with a slightly leaky roof. Bytemark, the people who actually run the machine this site lives in, were there with a big multi-player gaming rig. Matthew (of Bytemark) told me that a light mist had headed for the gaming rig earlier in the day when it had rained! There is a cinema, which was the main stage, an atrium, which is really the covered courtyard of the factory, and a small, expensive, place to eat conference food. Nothing for vegies or anybody who wants green things in their food. Eat out is my advice.

Day 1

I arrived around 12.00, just in time for the afternoon session:

• Jeremy Allison – an update on where Samba’s been, is and is going. This was an interesting and amusing talk delivered with Mr Allison’s typical blend of wit, verve and sarcasm.
• Gong-a-Thong – a series of lightening talks compered by a man in a thong. Really. Actually, a man dressed in a thong, racoon feet and gloves who arrived complete with comedy racoon head. A mixed bag of excellent, dull, incomprehensible and, frankly, bizarre talks that can last no longer than 5 minutes. The bizarre one left me speechless.
• Conduit – what’s happening with desktop sync in the Gnome world. Quite a lot it turns out. The chap was very knowledgeable, but a tad on the dull side.
• LUGRadio Live and Unleashed – the Podcast done live. This was typically excellent, with a few dull moments. And it turned out, this isn’t the last LUG Radio Live. No more podcasts though, but another Live event next year in … Wolverhampton

And off to the hotel we go. I stayed at the Quality Inn in Wolverhampton which was the official hotel and was a bargain at £32 for b&b. The only major problem was that the room was hotter than hell. The shower was also scalding hot and took about 10 minutes of wrangling to get something that could actually be stood under. Breakfast, on the other hand was good with the usual array of hot and cold food. Nothing like a fry-up to battle a hangover.

The evening saw the LugRadio party at the same venue. This had the joy of Karaoke. You either like Karaoke or you don’t. I don’t. Everybody seemed to have fun and drink lots which meant day 2 had a quieter start:

Day 2

After a brief introduction by the LugRadio team, straight into the talks:

• Demoscene – some amazing animations/films generated by the people who crack(ed) games. Essentially, computer generated graphics and music in real-time; no videos allowed. These are unconferences that allow people to demonstrate just how good they are at visual and musical feasts delivered in real time on a variety of computing platforms ranging from 8-bit Atmels to quad-core Intel monsters. Good, but very loud.
• The great debate – Jeremy Allison, Mathew Garret, Tony (the LugRadio community guy), Max Spevack (Fedora Project) with Jono Bacon as the compere. It was generally amusing as they debated GPL3, Distro release synchronisation, OOXML as well as whether computing is fun enough for new blood to enter it.
• Telepathy – which should have been interesting, but wasn’t as the delivery was very dry – some people actually fell asleep. But we did get to see the XO (OLPC) which uses Telepathy as part of it’s networking stack to do collaboration between XOs.

People

I met some really interesting people during the event. It ranged from business owners/consultants to network administrators, to programmers, community managers, etc. The social side, particularly the chats during the part on the Saturday night were great, and I now know a lot more faces than names. Which is partly my problem – I remember faces much better than names. Hopefully, I’ll run into them again.

If you didn’t go this year, it looks like you could next year!

Europeans and other potential enemies of the US are to be forced to deposit their personal details on the Department of Homeland Security’s computer system 72 hours before they get anywhere near the place.

The new rules will apply to citizens of the UK, and other countries whose citizens can travel to the US under the “visa waiver program”, from January next year. The prime motivation for the scheme is increased concern in Washington that European grown terrorists can exploit the visa waiver program to get into the US and wreak havoc.

Such a beautiful, interesting country populated by really great people; sadly governed by (apparent) idiots.

On their web site, they go to great lengths to say how safe the data will be; that the DNA and other information will be held anonymously and that they definitely won’t give the information to anyone (except if told to by the legal authorities). Except, the data isn’t held anonymously.

To quote from their web site in the confidentiality section:

• Your DNA samples and information are stored anonymously – that means any information which can identify you, such as your name and address, date of birth or NHS number is taken off your data and samples and stored separately.
• Information is encrypted. We do need to be able to identify your samples and information so that we can track your medical records, contact you again or destroy your samples if you withdraw. We do this by using a code. Only those UK Biobank staff with access to the code will be able to connect you with your information and samples.

Note that the emphasis is mine. Therefore, they can identify your DNA samples. They just keep the key in a separate database. Thus, they can equally reconstruct a database with your DNA records and name, address, and any other details that are held quite easily. They just say they won’t.

Tinfoil hat time. I can foresee a near-future event where the Government decides that 500,000 DNA records are just too interesting to be kept away from their ID database and decide to pass legislation to gather all DNA databases into the (future) ID database. It would just be too tempting for them. I just can’t take the risk. As much as I would like to help science, I really don’t want my DNA ending up on yet another poorly secured database where just about any Government employee can access it. Better yet, in the process of transferring the data, they will burn it to a CD unencrypted and leave it in a briefcase in a taxi or something similar. Sorry, don’t want to be a part of that.