I was wondering, what is this off the coast of Lincolnshire? Volcano? Meteor hit? A washed up barrow? A mud circle made by boffins or kids to perplex me? Any ideas?

The last few weeks I’ve been thrown in at the deep end of some Flex development and with a few minutes to kill on a train to London I thought I’d let you know how I’m liking it. I’m not the biggest fan of MacroMedia because for me they were a classic example of why proprietary software sucked. Back in ‘96 I reported replicable Director bug in their XML handling to do with capitalization that they happily informed me would be fixed in the next 6 months (it wasn’t). They made open source look a shade more compelling at the time.

I won’t start with a rant against semi-colons and curly brackets. Although they still irritate me you {kind of get into the habit don’t you?};

I’ve been using the Flex 3 development tool (built on top of Eclipse) which has a passable GUI editor. I prefer the KITCHEN SINK version which has everything in rather than adding the Flex plugins because the layout and tools are totally Flex focussed.

I like the fact that you can debug your code, stepping through each line and watching variables BUT when you do, it isn’t half slow. At this point I’d also like to be able to hide all the “_” variables that aren’t mine.

I really don’t like ActionScript. Having to declare variables just slows you down. So far, the main thing that has slowed me down has been related to coercion, trying to get an XMLList to behave like an ArrayCollection (or whatever). This pickiness reminds me of AppleScript, another pig of a language to coerce.

The application you build is an (m)XML file, that has scripts, controls and other xml expressed objects in it which then gets compiled into Flash files.

So far, my only disappointments are that the documentation NEVER has enough examples, showing how you might do something and that there isn’t a Flex interpreter. At the end of a particularly hard day I fired up python and typed…

import os
dir(os)

… just to feel in control again.

The project I’ve been working on has been taking XML data and turning into lovely charts. I’m really impressed with the charting components because you can add so much extra interactivity and functionality compared to a png file. I’m pretty confident that I could do a ukulele chord component with the skills I’ve learned over the last few weeks.

The next week’s challenges will all be about turning my lovely chart into something that is genuinely accessible… wish me luck.

p.s The wifi on the train to London actually works today (although they’ve just announced on the tannoy that it doesn’t… eh?) but I think this might be because there are no power sockets in the carriages so only people with a full battery can use it.

The waist-high shelf is slowly stalking Matt Edgar. Patterns get you in the end.

In the early 80s there was a kids show with a very snotty puppet on it called “Green Gilbert”. Gilbert was improvised and dangerous and totally out of order. I vaguely remember him shouting “Flush it Barry! Flush it Barry” when they had a cop on the show talking about the dangers of drugs. Does anyone else remember Gilbert or even better know of any YouTube clips that could convince me that Gilbert wasn’t the unlikely genius that I thought he was at the time.

It seems funny that even with Google and YouTube there is little evidence Gilbert existed.

p.s I think the person that played Gilbert was in tonight’s Dr Who and that comedian who mainly does Mick Jagger… you know the one.

You know that feeling when you get a song in your head and you can’t get it out? It can be horrible can’t it, like a curse.

But it can get worse. In my case, I’ve been doing a lot of driving and trying to sing The Fratellis’ Chelsea Dagger to myself and no matter how hard I try it always inevitably ends up as Joe Dolce’s Shaddup Your Face, in the same way as whenever I start a Welsh accent it seems to end up Pakistani.

Go listen to both and be thankful that there is nothing new under the sun, except the Fratellis have dancing girls.

So Doug says…

I hate it when you are working your arse off on a project and being fairly obsessive, like I can be, and there you are actually creating sites, coding in your sleep… and it’s just not RESTful.

… and we all fell about laughing, wondering if he’d carefully planned the gag or not.

Following on from my rant on data…. here’s a quick example I made of using the Semantic Hacker API in Python. You can pass in a chunk of text or a URL and get back a list of categories that data should be in. Very very clever.

I’m weaving this in with other semantic toolsets and getting excited by the potential. You know Paul, “this could change everything”, and if not it might come a close second-best, which is to change something. It’s a start eh?
Now let’s all go win the million dollars before bedtime.

It really does seem to me that data is where all the Web2.0 action is.

Because there has been so much talk about mashups it can be easy for us to be tired of hearing about them. We are all a bit Web2.0 weary already. Once you’ve seen one GoogleMap it’s hard to get excited about the next.

I’ve been refining my data-mining tools over the weekend, adding in some semantic possibilities (trying to understand what the data is about) and visualisation (trying to communicate what large amounts of data actually tells you). These two technologies, from my perspective have really matured over the last 5 years to the point where idiots like me can use them.

Being data-driven is key element for any online business these days. Even for the smaller business, there’s real value hiding in their data. Or to put it another way, there’s money in data, money in data about data, money in data about data about data and most companies are squandering their opportunity, missing the point.

The Four Types Of Data You Are Probably Burning

Of course, your company isn’t burning the data in a destructive way, but it is lying there, unwashed and unwanted. As a creative exercise, all you have to do it pick two of the types of data from the list below and “breed” them. I guarantee you will have a fantastic idea for your company.

1. Data That’s Out There (Wild, Free Range Data)

Out there on the internet is data just sitting there. You can take that data and do something with it, for example Google did that and they haven’t done so bad. Of course you might have to find two or three interesting sources of data and be creative with it but it IS possible.
And lurking in all the data that’s out there are things that people want to find an can’t. Whether you think Google is a good search engine or not if you examine what your customers really want the chances are you can help them to achieve it.

What are people saying about your company? Reputation-based search engines are starting to appear but do they work for your company?

The online landscape is rich with wild and free data, all you have to do is do if first find it, and then something interesting with it. “Interesting” doesn’t even have to be difficult to be interesting.

2. Your Internal Data (Captive Data)

Most companies are sitting on databases of products, people, places, messages and information flow. If you can find a way to blend your captive data with the wild stuff then you have a good chance of producing a healthy hybrid.

A trivial example might be to use data-mined data alongside customer lists. I can already imagine a “discovered” Flickr feed for a CRM system. I said the example was trivial, I meant scary.

Another tactic is to experiement with letting your captive data out into the wild with RSS feeds and seeing what happens.

3. Your Customers Data ( Very Sensitive Data )

Calm down. I don’t mean customers’ data per se, I mean data about data. I still find it fascinating that I would be loathe to a bookshop other than Amazon because they’ve not only got my addresss, but they’ve got the addresses of people I send stuff to. I can’t imagine how anyone could ever replace Last.fm because my listening chart has taken years to build up.

You sites’ log files, in fact all the stuff you know about your customers is data that becomes more valuable than the original transaction. It’s the data, my usage of the system (perhaps aggregated with other customers) that keeps me coming back.

4. Your Competitors Data (Almost Secret Data)

I say competitor, but by that, I mean any other organisation that is letting their data run free. There are opportunities to mix a customers profile data with some of your data.

The first thing that comes to mind is a terrible example… What if a call centre played me songs I like rather than ones I don’t? I said it was terrible, but it’s doable right now. A company has my phone number which is tied to my email address which is enough to find my Last.fm account and fish out a Nine Inch Nails track. If I’m phoning to complain though it would probably be better from them to look for songs Delicious tagged with “relaxing” and send me one of those whilst my call is being valued.

My point is that many companies are throwing away their crown jewels, their usage data. There exists huge opportunities for companies willing to blur their data boundaries, finding genuinely useful data where there once was none, combining external free-range data with internal data and letting internal data let it’s hair down a bit.

This data revolution isn’t just about Google Maps.

Oooh! I’ve been tagged for the first time. All those hours deciding who I’d invite to dinner and what my last words would be and what animal I’d be … wasted!

And the tagger in question is Paul, who is bringing up the dirty “V” word in The Vision Thing. The poor love sounds a bit jaded doesn’t he? How anyone could possibly be jaded with all these shiny web2.0 baubles to play with is beyond me (and the pale) but here’s my response…

I Feel Your Vision Pain Brother. At times, probably more often that I’d like to admit, everything to do with computers just makes me sigh so deeply that the shelves rattle. I wonder “Is it me or is all of this just complete crap?” and feel very alone and lonely. At times I am astonished at what other people find any good, but then I’m still working out if Delicious and Twitter have any real value at all. And this internet thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either.

What is Vision anyway? Most of the stuff peddled as vision nowadays is no such thing. Most of Web2.0 vision is actually about assumptions, the assumption that we can create a scalable video hosting site easily, the assumption that users generate content, the assumption that Google will buy our last techno-whim.

What’s My Vision Thing? Well, you did ask, kinda. I’m very fortunate cursed with a butterfly mind. I can be easily distracted or if you were being generous you might say I am very inquiring and experimental. What this means is that whilst traveling through times in which Vision is scarce, I can busy myself with The Next Best Thing knowing that, when I least expect it, something so new and fab it hurts will blow my socks off. It’s a waiting game in which you might as well spend the boring bits at least trying to make it interesting. You never know.
On the subject of experimentation and research, I’ve got to tell you that yesterday was a break-through day for me. One of those days when three or four tinkering strands came together in a spume of code. It’s early days but its a mashup of data-mining, natural language processing, visualisation and crispy bacon (it’s still in alpha). I was so excited about this thing I’d made that I gibbered. And here’s the rub, I stumbled across this whilst doing real work, you know, the dull stuff.

In the past I’ve done the Vision thing so many times and I’ve never created a meme… and worse than that, I’ve found myself banging on about something for years and then someone else creates the term that defines it and I then waste my time wearing my best “I told you so hat”.

So my Vision for next few years is, as ever, that there will be more of the same (only slightly better) and loads of crap that becomes a success despite my disregard. Mark my words, this one will come true!

Do Something Else… Quick!

So, in true bloke style, rather than simply listening I’m going to try and find a solution to your current Vision predicament with some handy hints for beating the ennui..

• Take a break. You sound like you need a holiday. People need holidays. I need a holiday. The internet will still be there when you get back, only slower.
• Do something very different on your computer, something meaty. For me it was playing with natural language processing and visualisation that opened the doors of excitement again. What were you tinkering with five years ago that you never quite finished? You are older and wiser now. Now you might crack it.
• Do a very boring job. There’s nothing like drudgery to set the mind a-wandering.
• Dig out your old heroes. Go watch the Doug Englebart videos and imagine how he must feel having created software in 1960 that is still unparelled in today’s Web2.0 loveliness. And then Tommy Cooper.
• Learn the ukulele
• Get out more. I find that other people never fail to inspire me. Let’s have a pint soon! I’ll do the best I can on the inspiration front.

You’ve given me an idea there. Us geeks, especially the self-employed ones really should have supervisors/mentors. Someone to talk to about work. Sure GeekUp is great but I mean something more, well, selfish and less social. A bit like professional technological therapy to stop us all going mad or strange.

Your first session is free.

I got very intrigued about the Intel Mash Maker because it has a Firefox plug-in and a great logo. I tried it. It didn’t work. But the best bit was that the screencast video doesn’t have audio. I’d restarted a few times thinking it was crappy WMV files before I noticed the note.

The author confirmed that it’s not a bug — these videos actually have no audio.

Thanks guys… really web2.0! They need a mac and a copy of this… (via Twitterwhere finding Edd round the corner).

This lets you add a few URLs and instantly create a search engine. Brought to by an ex-Google employee who I think must have left with Google’s databases on a USB stick. How else can you explain “instant indexing”?

I made a  Ukulele Songs  search engine, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

I warm to the idea of this site just because it is so needed, giving geeky busy-bodies like me a much welcome sense of achievement.
FixMyStreet.