I was involved in an online conversation yesterday, which started off being about ensuring inclusivity and appears to have ended up with me being considered a racist homophobe. For the record, I’m neither.

It took me a long while to work out where the offence had been caused. I think that, in my haste, I had phrased one sentence very poorly. The message I had meant to convey ended up, I believe, interpreted as one rallying against support groups for minorities.

The words we choose are significant. Their true meanings are too.

Take an example: Equality. This seems to have become the shorthand for Equal Opportunities – the ideal of equal treatment and respect. However, the common usage meaning of the word has been reversed, and now it’s not unusual to hear “Equality is NOT about treating everyone the same”. I’ve heard that from Equalities and Diversity people.

Positive Discrimination, itself an oxymoron, adds fuel to the fire. “By discriminating against different groups we can beat discrimination”. Who came up with that idea?

But is this all being pedantic? Does the conventional meaning of a word matter, when the language is constantly changing and evolving?

Yes. It matters.

It’s disingenuous to talk of equality when what you mean is a different form of inequality.

It’s inaccurate to portray people who are against Positive Discrimination as being against Equality, especially that warped brand of equality that is widespread today.

We are all a minority of one.

The State should start working on genuine Equality of Opportunity, and stop sponsoring antiEquality.

Take a hypothetical example - Clark County Council wants to encourage staff to suggest ways that things could be improved and money saved. To facilitate this they implement a simple online “Suggestions Box” facility, allowing colleagues to comment on, and rate each others ideas.

Now, if you’re actually interested in beneficial, cost effective change within a public body, what would you do next?

(a) Let anyone implement any of the ideas in an uncontrolled fashion

(b) Summarise the results for senior managers to discuss

(c) Let staff form groups and argue the case for implementation of ideas they really believe in

We can achieve great things, in manageable steps, if we can only bring ourselves to trust. Trust ourselves, colleagues, management … [“but make allowance for the doubting too” – Ed)

And the first thing we should change is how we manage change -

“Think, Understand, Do”

It turns out that the “Do” part is really quite important.

I don’t use an iPhone.  I wouldn’t say I’m panicking, but I’m not very happy.

This brought me to wondering where the motivation comes from to retire perfectly useful (from my perspective) and accessible facilities, and to replace them with device-specific systems.
There is a curious aspect to mobile phone ownership nowadays – the “fanbois” who argue at great length that their chosen device is superior to any and all others. To my mind this stems from the desire to be shown to have chosen the “right” handset, the “cool” device – the “best”.

I read a survey a while back which appeared to show that smartphone owners generally prefer “native applications” – applications developed specifically for their device, rather than generic or web-based services. I know I have long held a preference for that myself.

So lets assume that your average smartphone user (a) prefers native applications, and (b) wants their choice of device to be validated and, in some ways, the range and facilities of native applications does that.

Is that the motivation for companies to develop these applications?

Take my news sites as an example, what facilities do they plan to add to their iPhone app that could not be provided by a web-service? 

GPS location?  Would hyper-local news be of interest to me?  Actually no, I loathe local news stations, I’m interested in National and International news.

Uploading images? I guess you could have a button to take a picture and upload it. Is that of use to the company, or of interest to other consumers? Perhaps, but I suspect not.

Audio might be the thing. Being able to stream or download an audio version of the news might be interesting, but wouldn’t that just be a podcast? Why reinvent the wheel for something that most Brits would be too self-conscious to play in public?

Just because there can be “an app for that” doesn’t meant here should be an app for that.

I suspect that the “new features” that will be offered by the native application for my news site will be less than compelling.  Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong.

In the meantime all of us lose a perfectly good facility, with a lack-lustre replacement, and the promise of an unwarranted development to come.

But perhaps my annoyance is exaggerated because I don’t use an iPhone – my choice of handset has not been validated by this company. I am shamed, cast out, a leper amongst mobile users. Unclean. Well, no – they plan an Android app too which no doubt I’ll rave about when it beats the pants of the iPhone version.

extract all the file attachments from your emails in two button clicks.

most corporate email systems limit the size of your “mailbox” (which, in microsoft exchange means your calendar, inbox, contacts, notes and tasks). that’s all well and good, but if your inbox is overloaded, or if you receive lots of large attachments, it can become a real chore just to keep the messages flowing.

the attached script prompts you to browse for an outlook folder to process, and for each email in that folder it will:

extract each file attachment

save it to a specified folder structure (e.g. c:\attachments\yyyy\mm\dd)

add a note to the body of the email to remind you where the attachment has been stored

-

by limiting the script to a single folder at a time it makes it faster and more manageable, but the code could be adpated to export every attachment from every email.

-

attachment_extract

OK, a great feature, and one i’ve really wanted for some time.

google calendars can accept an import from outlook, or you can use the free (and surprisingly good) free google calendar sync utility.

however, if your work desktop is locked down tigher than … like mine is, well then you might need something like this.

the attached code creates 2 extract files: c:\contacts.csv and c:\calendar.csv, which you can then import into google calendar and mail via the web interface.

you’ll want to make some minor changes:

specify the filename and path for the two extract files (they default to the root of the c drive)

specify your email address to have the extracts sent to. if you’re doing the import from the same machine you might want just rem the send_email function out.

it’s a manual process, and i’m still looking for something better, but for now it gives me the end result i’ve waited years for.

outlook_extract_code

considering turning it into a hackintosh – anyone care to comment on their experiences? seems easy enough.

keeping track of medication doses, especially with the wife doing it as well, is important but fiddly. i want an easy, universal way for us both to do it.

as I always have my mobile with me (yes, even at home), i’ve got into the habit of recording medications in my calendar. it means i don’t have to try to remember who had what, and when.

creating a calendar entry is more fiddly than it needs to be for such a simple task though, so i’m looking into developing a better solution.

what I wanted is something like this:

1. tap a photo (or the initials) of the patient, from a list of pre-defined patients
2. tap a photo (or name) of the medicine, from a pre-defined list of medicines
3. tap something (maybe the medicine again) to indicate the number of doses

That then records the patient, medicine, doses and automatically adds a timestamp. simples.

but then i thought about twitter.

we can both tweet from our mobiles, and we don’t need more than 1-2 days worth of history. if we choose a hashtag (#kidsareillagain) we could easily find when the last medication was.

do we want medication history of the kids in twitter is another question though…

excellent coverage through the house, which used to be flaky 2G at best.

one draw back is that when the broadband connection gets slow it dies, doesn’t recover by itself, and leaves you with no signal at all – until you notice and reset the box

so much for “Get Guaranteed 3G Signal In Your Home, No Matter Where You Live!”

qr codes are great, but rely on a suitable device, whereas all digital mobiles in the uk are capable of sending sms messages.

but typing a url, or even a long english language in an sms message, can be a pain.

something in between would be useful… a short code which could be used to represent a ‘thing’.

i came up with the concept of a tiny_id – something like tinyurl to represent any existing item reference id, not just a url.

—

scenario:

you see a planning application notice attached to a lamp-post. the planning application number is SE/10/00906/OUT.

you want to know more, register an interest, or perhaps object to the proposed development.

you could point your barcode scanner at a qr code (if you have a camera equiped phone, and the software installed) and read more (if you have a data plan with your mobile subscription, and a mobile browser that can render the page). potential problems.

or you could also enter the tiny_id, printed on the notice, and send it as an sms (perhaps to a shortcode that authority/.organisation provides).

in this example the mobile number of the sender might be recorded in a list of people interested in this planning application.

—

limitations and opportunities :

using only alpha-numeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), and not using symbols or case sensitivity, makes input easier. there are 52,523,350,144 combinations available from a 7-character string.

the tiny_id is stored in a database, along with the original id (SE/10/00906/OUT in this case).

other functions, such as phone requests, could also be simplified by referring to the same data.

—

connections between user and systems with tiny_id

the topic of qr codes came up again, something i’ve looked at before, but we’ve still not got a feeling for market penetration of the barcode scanners in phones.

for a couple of years some new devices have come with scanners – windows mobile, android are the ones i’ve used personally – but these aren’t going to be common in the grand scheme of things.

there must be some research out somewhere.

i think that needs answering before we get carried away, but i really hope some of the ideas actually start appearing on a bus top near me soon.

further reading:

http://transformedbyyou.ning.com

http://www.fellowcreative.com/2009/05/playing-with-qr-codes/