MGM v Grokster - so what?

Sorry, I can’t leave the MGM v. Grokster case alone. Ben Hammersley, he of utility kilts and the Observer Blog nails exactly what I’ve been thinking:

Declaring filesharing illegal across the net because it’s illegal in the US is like declaring the web broken because it’s censored in China.

This seems to be following a distinctly unilateral trend for the US - what with their leadership’s attitude to climate change, Guantanamo and Iraq, the pattern seems to be one of “to hell with the rest of the world, we’ll go our own way”. To which the rest of the world replies “fine, we’ll get on with it, then.”

A casual browse of Tom Peters’ blog will throw up any number of statistics about the staggering size and power of the Chinese and Indian economies. Production of virtually everything from consumer electronics to clothing is the preserve of the Pacific Rim. The largest film industry is in Bollywood, not Hollywood. So what chance that a software developer in Beijing or Shanghai or Mumbai or Bangalore is going to pay any attention whatsoever to a pronouncement from the US Supreme Court?

Estimating Realistic Project Deadlines

There’s an interesting post on Open Loops about the pitfalls of accurately-estimating project durations - and specifically the problem of over-optimistic schedules:

Many project managers can be myopic in this area and not see the potential pot holes in the road ahead of their projects. Being aware of these stumbling blocks and developing a system to accurately project deadlines can bring projects in on time and underbudget.

The technique is an interesting mix of mindmapping and focussing on next actions - in other words, ensuring that you’ve got a realistic and robust work breakdown structure - as well as a formulaic calculation. It’s not clear whether the formula is a rule-of-thumb or has been derived from data, but it’s probably a useful starting point.

I’m always a little wary of formulas - when there’s a calculation to come up with an answer, there’s always a temptation to rely on this as a definitive God-given answer that has to be correct to five decimal places - but if people are involved as a factor, there’s a danger that you’re lucky if the answers are accurate to an order of magnitude.

Nevertheless, it’s a good technique for creating quick-and-dirty “straw men” for planning purposes, and the breakdown steps are a good way of approaching the planning process.

The simplest ideas are the best

The simplest ideas are often the best, and this is a perfect demonstration.

A Cambridge-based paramedic has launched a national campaign with Vodafone to encourage people to store emergency contact details in their mobile phones.

Bob Brotchie, a clinical team leader for the East Anglian Ambulance NHS Trust, hatched the plan last year after struggling to get contact details from shocked or injured patients.

By entering the acronym ICE – for In Case of Emergency – into the mobile’s phone book, users can log the name and number of someone who should be contacted in an emergency.

Brilliantly simple - it relys on a device that most of us carry all the time, without the need for any additional software, systems, databases etc.

MGM v Grokster

The US Supreme Court finally released their verdict in the MGM v. Grokster case this afternoon, and the blogs are currently a-twitter with fevered speculation analysis of what it will all mean. My first thought was something along the lines of “oh well, best buy another iPod before the music business gets around to suing Apple out of existence”, but then I downloaded the verdict and a cursory read made me change my mind.

The summary opinion of the court states:

We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.

IANAL, but that’s not the same as saying “one who distributes a device capable of infringing copyright is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties”. It’s stating what appears to be the bleeding obvious, to me at least - if you create a device that is capable of both legal and illegal uses and promote it as primarily for illegal uses, someone is going to get unhappy about that and take legal potshots at you.

So far from being the absolute and final last word (which was what I always understood the Supreme Court to be for, but IANAL) all I can see this doing is creating yet more work for lawyers, and yet more work for the RIAA and MPAA spin doctors who will be no doubt presenting this as a tremendous victory. Unfortunately for them, it doesn’t make their business models any less broken.

Perhaps the last word should go to Hilary Rosen, former record industry shill and lately someone who appears to be reaping that which she sowed:

…knowing we were right legally really still isn’t the same thing as being right in the real world.

MIT Media Lab survey

The MIT Media Lab are conducting an online survey of the “greater weblog community” (their phrase), looking at the way blogs are used to communicate:

Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

Hacking the Blackberry for GTD

Although the latest iteration of the Blackberry software does support categories, it’s not perfect - particularly if you’re trying to follow the GTD processes. Here’s a quick hack that works around the limitiations to an extent.

The problem arises because the default task view on the Blackberry is alphabetical - there’s no way to group tasks into contexts as you would be able to in Outlook etc. If you’ve got a huge list of tasks - and if you’re GTD-ing you will have - it means that you’ll get a screenfull of tasks beginning with a to c, and everything else is scrolled off the bottom.

It is possible to filter the display by category, but that takes a minimum of four clicks and a lot of scrolling, which offends against the whole hair-trigger nature of GTD (or at least it offends against my hair-trigger nature when it comes to using devices like a Blackberry. It’s supposed to be simple, dammit.)

The hack is to prefix each task name with the initial letter of the category - ‘A’ for agenda tasks, ‘C’ for calls & emails and so on. It does assume that you’ve only got 26 categories and they each start with a different letter of the alphabet, but hey, I did say that this was a hack, didn’t I?

Then hitting a letter key in the main tasks display will filter the list down to those categories that start with that letter - in other words, hitting ‘C’ should filter everything in the ‘Calls’ category.

Unfortunately, it’s not absolutely foolproof - other tasks containing that letter will be picked up too, but the point is that they’ll be alphabetically sorted by the category letter, so at least it’s relatively easy to spot the tasks in the category that you’re concerned about.

Another quick tip is that you can mark a task complete by selecting it and hitting the space key - obvious if you know it, I suppose, but it was news to me when I discovered it…

Blackberries and GTD

Having given my Blackberry a thorough roadtesting over the last couple of weeks, here’s a few thoughts, particularly as far as GTD is concerned.

Overall, it’s nice to have a device where fast data entry is possible. The form factor isn’t perfect, but it’s an acceptable compromise and a big improvement on a pen-based system - thumbs might not be as accurate as all eight fingers, but they’re far more accurate than the alternative Graffitti-style character entry.

The main advantages as far as GTD are concerned are:

• you’re able to use the device in situations where pen and paper would be difficult
• the content is synched back to your corporate server, so changes to diaries etc are immediately updated
• the synching also acts as a backup, so this is instantaneous and seamless - you just forget that it’s happening, which is about as good as it can get as far as backup is concerned.

There are some downsides, however.

• the support for categories within the tasks application is pretty rudimentary - although there is a category field, you can’t sort the display, only filter. That displays a list of the tasks in a specified category, but it’s several clicks away from the main screen. However, there’s a hack for this, more of which later.
• similarly, the options for using categories in the other apps is fairly basic. This isn’t quite so problematic as it is with tasks, but if you make a lot of use of categories it might be a bit of a bind.
• the support for non-Windows ‘partner systems’ is pretty ropey - there’s a third-party sync app, but it’s very clear that this is a device aimed at Wintel-based corporates.

Overall

In general, I’m fairly impressed with the device, and I’ll probably be able to live with the limitations. It helps that for a proportion of the time I’m sat in front of a Windows laptop, so working in Outlook make things slightly easier (or at least as much as anything is easy with Outlook). I’m not sure that a Blackberry would be a complete replacement for a laptop, but it goes a long way towards being that perfect combination of PIM and device.

RSS and Outlook

If you live in Outlook (and let’s face it, with the ever-increasing integration with other systems, it’s what Microsoft want you to do) then it makes sense to use it as your newsreader. Up to now, the only Outlook-integrated newreader I’ve been aware of is Newsgator, although it seems that their focus is more towards pushing their online services these days.

Via Visual Being I came across RSS Popper, which does much of what Newsgator does with the added bonus (if you’re that way inclined) of being freeware. It’s a relatively early beta version, so probably best not to expect absolute stability, but first impressions are encouraging - it supports all the varients of RSS, podcasting, OPML upload and download, and so on. Particularly useful is the full-page download, which means you can cache blog pages for offline reading.

This might be worth checking out if you’re a heavy Outlook user, and prefer that to an online aggregator such as Bloglines.

Critical thinking at Harvard

Here’s an interesting article on critical thinking, over at Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge site (spotted via their email newsletter, although they do have an RSS feed here). It’s a pretty good and concise overview of the topic, with a nice summary:

1. Make sure you understand the logic behind your decision.
2. Identify your assumptions and double-check them.
3. Collect the data that will support or disprove your assumptions.
4. Deliberately consider the situation from multiple frames.
5. Remember the people!
6. Think short and long term.

Six Sigma blog

If you’re a fan or a user of Six Sigma, it’s worth taking a look at the imaginatively-titled Six Sigma Blog. It would appear to do exactly what it says on the tin (not something you could ever accuse this blog of doing) - not too much in the way of background on who they are and what they do, but some interesting content nonetheless.