Say “Hello”

Finally bowing to modern two-way communication, I’ve enabled comments for this blog. To add your own thoughts to one of my posts, click on the little link which says “No comments” (or the number of comments that there are). And fill in the form. Please say “Hello” now to check it works!

If you get the email subscription to this, note that I’ve migrated it from Yahoo Groups to the new blogging software I’m using. Let me know if this email is or isn’t working, or doesn’t look right. I’ll post to the Yahoo Group soon, and then shut it down if everything is fine.

Love letter to democracy

Today we’ve launched our first finished mySociety project. It’s called WriteToThem and it performs magic. OK, not quite magic, but some things which haven’t been done before. Go on, try it out:

  1. Enter your postcode.
  2. Find out all of your elected representatives.
  3. And then easily send them a letter.

I’m betting you didn’t know who your local councillors or your MEPs were before, never mind had such a convenient way of contacting them.

Fifty springs are little room

This afternoon it was sunny, and I went out to look at the crocuses near the back of St John’s and Trinity colleges. They’re roughly here on a map. Every spring I wait for them to magically appear, the first magnificent sweep of flowers, they make the eyes glow to stare at them. Today there was even a bee happily buzzing between them, as if in a childrens’ book. You can kneel down and peer, but no amount of biology will resolve the flowers’ mystery.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me only fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
Above the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A E Houseman

So, that time is here. Make a break today to find some flowers near you.

Bindery and Conservation

On Wednesday a couple of friends who work at the Cambridge University Library showed me round. The only bit I took notes on was the book conservation section and the bindery. The UL is a copyright library, so gets all books printed in the UK for free, and it also buys foreign books and pamphlets. In total over 120,000 new books arrive every year. Some of these are lent out, and many of those have to be rebound to be strong enough. As well as all these new books, they also have lots of very old ones.

Conservation

The conservation section is where ancient manuscripts are worked on to help preserve them. J showed me a book he was working on rebinding. It was originally bound in oak, a few millimetres thick, and covered in calfskin. Not only the cover was made of hide.

So slack are modern people with the term, I hadn’t realised before that parchment was animal skin. Before paper was made from trees, monastries would use the lamb hides from their large herds to make books. I felt the paper of one, it was softer, less course than tree paper.

When exhibiting an open book you have to be very careful how it is supported in its stand. J showed me prototype stands he was making to hold a book for public display. They were made from cardboard; when he gets the size and shape right they are made into plastic. The angle is careful chosen, and the points where the book makes contact with the stand. If it is on display for six months, the pages will droop downwards and permanently damage the book. You have to build little struts out to hold up the bottom of them.

The books were gorgeous handpainted medieval works. One was religous, the other scientific. Both still had vibrant colours centuries later, and lots of detail in gold leaf. One of them had been quite badly damaged by rebinding in the past, with the tops trimmed off pages removing bits of the text.

Bindery

Book re-binding is a violent but delicate passtime. Everyone in this section has a special way of handling books, that minimally harms them. They would gracefully raise the books up, lifting them fully off surfaces before sliding them along to their destination. There were two main rooms, accidentally gender segregated; the guillotines and glue were operated by men, the sewing done by women.

The first level of binding is a simple plastic sleave, or a slightly fancier glued-on paper covering. These are used if the sewing is already good on the book. If the stitches are no good, then they use violence in the form of a formidable guillotine.

Slice! Slice! The blade cuts along the entire length of the book in one stroke, removing a millimeter perfectly. The operator slices again and again until just enough of the spine is removed so all the pages come apart. For some journals, the pages from a sequence of issues are put together to form one volume.

According to the strength of paper, the pages go either to a mechanical sewing machine, or to a human. The machines are large, old and clever; intricate sytems of needles and microswitches which can bind a book together with thread. The binding girls sit in a cosier room, no doubt gossiping if I wasn’t there, looking at pin-ups of hunks, and painstakingly knitting a spine together again. Hand made stitches are much stronger. It gave me a surprised feeling of tradition to see work like this still done by hand.

Next the book goes through a complex sequence to apply the cover, which is called a case not a cover. Firstly this involves hammering the spine to get it in the right shape. Also now done with a machine. Then there are various layers of applying paper, cardboard and glue, and pressing the book. To finish off a computer operated machine stamps words in gold on the spine. Just 12 years ago they used to stamp the letters on by hand.

Despite all this mechanisation, the number of bookbinder staff has continued to rise. This is because the number of books arriving is going up and up. Information overload for some, but the library system is coping admirably. They are building yet another new extension.

Google is Your Menu

Last week, some of us finally made Directionlessgov.com, a search engine as your interface to the UK government. Have a go, it’s actually quite useful. It’s a bit of an in-joke, but makes a simple point well; these days everyone finds everything by Google. Normal people don’t go to fat, carefully crafted “web portals” like Directgov.

I saw this myself yesterday when my Mum was trying to give towards relief after the Tsunami. At the time the appeal website wasn’t yet up, and she searched for all sorts of things on Google, none of which got anywhere. In the end going to Oxfam’s home page first, then following the prominant link, worked well. But it was far harder than it should have been.

Most of my websites get most of their traffic from Google. If you search for the name of your MP you’ll find TheyWorkForYou and/or PublicWhip in the first few hits. When you’re making a website, it’s worth remembering that from your user’s point of view the <title> is actually a menu entry within Google. To most people, your content is just a part of the Internet. Not the part of your site which you think it is, with your excessive attachment to what you made.

The twist in the tale is, of course, that the Internet is now excessively centralised. Everyone from the nerdiest nerd to the grandest grandmother uses Google. That’s fine for now, but it’s dangerous when somebody with fewer scruples takes them over. Or when your business collapses because of a tweak in their page ranking algorithm. Endlessly the good consumer looks for alternatives…

How many people will you influence this afternoon?

There’s one strange thing which makes the job of writing software quite unlike any other sort of artisan. You can finely craft something just once, yet thousands, even millions of people end up using it.

Four years ago, I spent maybe ten evenings making the first version of a useful tool that I wanted myself. And then the occasional evening every few weeks for the next two years improving it. Ever so slightly obsessive, but not compared to the amateur mechanic who spends all summer in the garage building a kit car.

Then I go back and look, and it turns out 600,000 people have downloaded it in the last two and a half years. OK, I’m cheating, lots of them downloaded it twice or more. But that’s still at least 100,000 people, and many of them use it every day to help them get their work done. I know, because sometimes I meet them at parties.

So crazy is this modern world, there’s an entire, sprawling, incomprehensible website (called SourceForge) for people like me. We all put things we made for ourselves up there, so anyone else in the world can use them. And it doesn’t cost us anything. Anyway, the tool that I made is called TortoiseCVS. The news today is that this December it is SourceForge Project of the Month. Have a look, there’s a photo of me and everything.

What does this weird turtle thing do? Oh you don’t care, something to do with helping programmers keep track of changes they made to source code. If you want to try out one of these bits of “open source” software, go for something useful like a secure web browser to replace Internet Explorer.

Last Two Days at Burning Man

(Third and final part of a series. It’ll make more sense if you read First Two Days at Burning Man and Middle Two Days at Burning Man first. And What is Burning Man? if it’s still puzzling. The photo to the right is of the polyps I found in the desert on Friday. The photo below of the viewing platform in Illumination Village.)

Saturday

  • Shower queue, long now. Ice cream while waiting.
  • Repainted green, another two coats.
  • Burning man – paniced prepare
    • it was an art car rally!
    • standing on my shoulders to get better view
  • Group party hopping
    • spinning thing to sit on
    • fell asleep everywhere
    • braziers warm
  • Dawn

Sunday

  • Cooked breakfast for lots of people
  • Writing on the temple, cried reading them
  • Temple burning
  • Swinging fire thing, with 4 directions of nozzle and the propone blasts making it swing.
  • Braziers lit up, really fun to stand round

End

I missed writing down lots of things. Not just everything too social or too personal, but tiny incidents, and detailed descriptions. The problem with so much stimulation is that you don’t get the chance to reflect. There was less in depth conversation than I thought, because with the tasks of surviving and just looking at everything, you were fully sucked in and absorbed.

In that sense, it was for me a surprisingly shallow festival. An evening in the pub might have more richness and depth. Yet, somehow, the depth came through emotionally anyway, and you can’t help but be affected by it. I loved the notes and comments on the temple and the tree of life (described in a previous post). There’s peace in silencing philosophy, and enjoying life now.

mySociety Job

The charity that I work for (“shadowy social-software funders mySociety” as we were described in NTK) are hiring. We’re looking for someone to make all the websites we’re building as easy to use as possible, as well as look good. Or as the job advert says, “Strong PHP experience” and “Fanatical obsession with usability”. Please tell anybody you know who might fit this description, and post to relevant mailing lists.