There is an island.

This certainly contains spoilers. If you haven’t done the Lost thang, you probably should, because they’re really good, so stop reading this and head off to Amazon. Otherwise, if you’ve seen it all, and read all about it on E!, and seen the deleted scenes on DVD and so on, then you are truly qualified. Do read on.

There is an island.

The island has various inherent powers. It has a light in the middle. It has a strong electromagnetic force which baffles compasses and is prone to explosion. It is able to move, if a wheel is turned. Should the wheel be dislodged, the island can also travel in time. It is able to send people to the middle of a desert somewhere using the same wheel.

It has a large statue of an egyptian looking deity, and a smattering of ancient temples.

The island cannot be approached except by submarine, shipwreck or plane crash. The island cannot be left except by wheel, or by following a single compass bearing. People heal quickly on the island, regardless of the ailment.

A woman lives on the island.

One day a boat crashes on the island. After helping the survivor give birth to two boys, she kills the mother and takes the boys as her own.

Time passes, the boys grow.

The fair haired boy is fairly happy with his lot.

The dark haired boy learns of his mother’s demise, and adoptive mother’s betrayal. He leaves the family and joins another small village on the island. He is keen to leave the island.

The other boy just shrugs. Maybe he’s stoned or something.

The mother kills the villagers, and in turn is killed by the dark haired boy. Before she dies, the mother gives her non-specific powers to the fair-haired boy, who throws his dark-haired-brother into a pool of light as punishment. The dark-haired boy dies, but lives on as a smoke monster. The smoke monster is able to take the form of dead people, and so becomes the dark-haired boy again. He is far from happy.

Time passes. One day, a tidal wave brings an old ship to the island, destroying the statue. The ship is the Black Rock, and contains a fragile amount of dynamite, which is mostly used by a crazy French woman from Babylon 5. The survivor of the shipwreck is offered eternal life by the fair-haired boy in return for eternal service. He leads a small group of villagers, trying to do the “right thing”, though none of them know what this is, as the fair-haired boy never actually says what it is he wants. Another group of villagers live in a temple not far away, but don’t seem to know any of this. They too, are big fans of the fair-haired boy. And karate. They love that stuff.

At some point the island is discovered by scientists (the “Drama Initiative”), who hope to use the island to mankind’s advantage, and breed polar bears. They achieve a peaceful standoff with the villagers, and establish a force-field to prevent the smoke monster killing people. The smoke monster does not attack the villagers outside the perimeter, for reasons unclear.

The scientists cause a problem, meaning the eletromagnetic field must be vented on a regular basis. They combine this with a psychological test by locking up the maintenance team, slap on some warnings of a virus outside, and then sit back and monitor them with video cameras. When the team forget to vent, they are shown scary symbols, and lights flash. Underwear is changd. When the system eventually explodes, it actually causes no damage, except to the venting system itself, proving the entire system was something of a timewaster.

Faced with the most ridiculous pseudo-scientific endeavours since the invention of homeopathy, the villagers outside the perimeter rise up against the harmless hippy scientists, headed by the poor son of a drunken employee who is unhappy with his lot. He leads the village and all are happy, though he does not permit them to leave.

The fair-haired boy decides to bring some new people to the island. He does this by crashing a plane on it. Many people are killed and injured. Of the survivors, many are then killed by the smoke monster. Of the survivors, many are killed by the villagers. Of those survivors, many are killed in attempts to leave the island. And of the few remaining survivors, some escape.

The majority of the escapees return to the island as soon as they are able, by crashing another plane on it. Of those people, most are killed by attempts to escape again, by villagers, and by the smoke monster, who has arbitrarily taken the form of one of the original plane crash survivors.

Of the handful of subsequent survivors, the leader of the villagers kills the fair-haired boy, for treating him poorly for most of his life. The fair-headed boy brushes it off like a bad smell, and still continues to plague the poor cursed humans he crashed on the place.

Some more people die.

The fair-headed boy offers the few remaining survivors the opportunity to take over the running of the island. One volunteers. He immediately does the opposite of everything he was meant to do. The smoke monster becomes vulnerable and is killed. He will never see Paris in the spring. Woo-hoo. The volunteer then dies. Aw. Someone else takes over, seconded by the leader of the villagers who has been accepted despite repeated killing and torture of other survivors.

The fair-headed boy is named Jacob. He is able to travel anywhere at whim. He brings people to the island knowing they will die. He is able to assist or even offer immortality, but he does not. He crashes planes for a bit of company. For some reason, he is know as the Good Guy.

The dark-haired boy simply wishes to leave the island. He cannot, for his brother killed him. He kills bad guys and good guys alike, but brings no people to the island. He seems no more morally corrupt than the survviors themselves, but is known as the Devil.

Is that fair?

Only Michael’s kid (“that’s MY boy”) and the Kwon’s kid (sob sob) leave the island in peace, and move on. I think probably, they win.

Of course, at the final judgement, they’re all dead. But they had a good time and made friends along the way. So that’s all ok then.

Good man. But what of the rest? The “www.” that was so unpronounceable is already obsolete, and personally I think twitter can take credit for popularising the contemporary non-dubbed url form. Boffins in lab coats has worked tirelessly to make memory ubiquitous and cheap, but we’ve just stuck some character limits in there to be fashionable or something. Hey ho. But the “www” is gone.

Can anyone tell me why there’s a huhtetep, “http:”, still shown in my address bar? What’s it for? What does it tell me? I don’t actually have to type it in these days, but it appears there anyway. Why?

Is it to show that I’m looking at a document provided by HyperText Transfer Protocol? I don’t care about that!

Is it to show that I *could* be looking at an FTP site, using the same browser? Ok, fair call, but that’s so rare to do so, that you could default to not showing “http:”, and then only show “ftp:” when FTP sites are used. It’s not like every browser has a built-in FTP client anyway. Same goes for local files.

Is it to show the “s” when I look at an “https” page, meaning that the connection between my browser and the website is encrypted? Well, ok, but what was wrong with the padlock? Why is there such a strong connection between certificates and https anyway? They mean completely different things. I don’t need a certificate to know gmail.com is Google. Equally, a certificate costs about 20 bucks and has so few checks that I’m hardly reassured when dealing with a new site by the presence of the certificate. What I want to see is a padlock. Drop the “https” and show me a padlock.

Is it for future extensibility, to enable a future Internet to use new and unusual protocols? Like “about:”? Again, it would be simple enough to recognise a default of http. If you go to about:config, then display the protocol. Why is this hard? If a new protocol came along to overtake http, then I think a bigger browser update would be needed anyway.

I think browser manufacturers should take treat it like the port. Every web page is served by a port, and for most of the web, that’s port 80. You could look at this website by typing http://kenneth.kufluk.com:80. But mostly, the 80 is assumed. You only ever type in a port if you’re not using port 80, such as for local development. If you type “:80″ into a web browser like Chrome, it disappears. Let’s do that for “http://” as well. if you’re thinking there might be confusion between ports and protocols, you’re wrong. Protocols are letters-only, Internet domains need at least one dot, and ports are only numeric.

I’m using Chrome version 5, the latest in a long history of browsers. Surely it’s long past time to kill off the http://. And if you look closely, you’ll see the iPhone already has.

But the Chancellor’s Budget introduced a new scheme which could give him a complete solution to everyone’s satisfaction, without him spending a penny. It’s not clear if he’s seen it.

Identification is vital to many forms of communication on the web, and we all have dozens of logins and passwords distributed across dozens of system.

OpenID is not software or a service. It’s not a company or organisation. It is simply a method of allowing you to use a single login for multiple websites. The key to this is that you choose who to handle your details, whether it be Google, Microsoft, Twitter or even your own server. You’ll have seen this when you see one of these “The application xxxx would like to access your Facebook details. Do you trust them?”.

The Chancellor announced bank accounts for all citizens. Effectively, everyone will have a bank account. Bank accounts issue credit/debit cards to their account holders. And these are forms of ID.

Those IDs could be used anywhere. If the government want to check your ID to give you a passport/pension/health/benefit, they could check your bank card. The banks will be able to add any security methods they like in order to secure the identity of the provider, be it biometric, photographic or secret key.

The government doesn’t have to spend a penny on issuing unpopular ID cards. There will be no national database of people. I can choose who to trust with my ID. And most people are already signed up.

That’s £6bn saved. Now all we need is to swap the NHS database for Google Health, and we’ll have saved ourselves the national debt.

One day, his watch breaks and starts running fast. It takes twice as long, according to the watch. Completing the same distance took twenty minutes. He buys a new watch.

The following week, some wanker at the council moves his tube station 400 yards further away. According to his new watch, the journey again takes twice as long as usual: twenty minutes. The man blames cheap foreign imports, and buys a new watch.

I have a grid in three dimensions. It’s held together with wires, will balls at the joints. Each wire is 10cm long.

The next day, I measure my grid with a ruler. Each wire is now 20cms long. But none of the balls look any further apart. I buy a new ruler.

I throw away my grid and buy a new one. It’s bigger.

A lot bigger.

My grid has balls one light-year apart. Each ball is held in a rigid cubic system as before. My grid extends to infinity in all six directions: up, down, to the left, to the right, in front, and behind. Infinitely.

I know what you’re thinking: “You must have huge balls”. But I don’t like to brag.

I measure the distance along the wires between the balls, not with a ruler, but with light and a stopwatch. A ball sends out light, and I time exactly one year before the light reaches the next ball. That’s one light-year.

All over the grid, it always takes one year for light to reach the next ball.

The next day, a fine summer’s day in 1665, Newton invents gravity. This does not go unnoticed.

Each one of my balls has a large mass, and so a strong gravitational pull. Each ball attracts every other ball around it, not just the nearest, but all of them. It’s quite a shock to my grid, but my grid still hangs together. I rush out and measure my wires again. To my relief, each wire, measured by pulses of light, is exactly one light-year long.

All is well and good, and my grid holds steady. Of course, it does not collapse in on itself, because it extends infinitely in every direction. As each ball pulls those around it, they are equally pulled away by those more distant. Each ball has an equal pull on its left and its right.

For 250-odd years, my grid hangs together, perfectly happily. Occasionally I step outside to admire my balls (steady), by the light of the moon.

In 1915, some bloke called Einstein completes his General Theory of Relativity. In it, he invents several fundamental principles. Mass-energy equivalence, for example, as shown by the famous equation e=mc^2. Woo.
Something else he does is change gravitational theory. Newton is now proved wrong, for gravity is not a force, it is a distortion of space and time caused by masses.

I have to admit, this funny-looking bloke has me scared. I rush out to check on my beautiful, infinite, gleaming grid and see whether it has been affected. And I find some disturbing results.

Near each of my massive balls (by which I mean, my balls with mass), there are some weird effects happening. Close to the surface of each mass, I find that time is running more slowly.

I dig out my trusty stopwatch and wait for the light. A ball emits light, and the light travels more slowly than usual near the ball. Further from the ball it picks up speed as it moves along the wire away from the ball, but then slows again as it gets near the other ball. In total, my stopwatch shows that two years have passed.

Shit. The bastard’s only gone and ruined my grid. I go back inside to sit down and have a calming cup of tea.

Edwin Hubble catches my attention in 1929. He’s spent ten years looking closely at my grid, and he’s found something more peculiar still. He watches as many balls as he can, from the one ball he’s sat on. He’s been looking at the light beams all over my grid and he’s worked out that my grid is expanding.

I’m incredulous. “Where would it expand to?” I ask, “It’s infinite, FFS.” But the arrogant fool is insistent. Look at the evidence, he says.

The distances, as measured by light, between each ball, are getting further apart. Ipso facto, the grid is getting bigger. I have a quick check, and he’s right. A beam of light now takes 3 years to get from one ball to another.

But if I’m honest, those balls look a bit smaller. They’ve taken some of the mass that was hanging between the balls, and they’ve pulled it in. They’ve squeezed themslves together. Effectively, they’ve become bigger and denser masses, I wasn’t expecting that. With tighter, more compact masses, the light travel time is more affected by the gravity, and so it takes longer to get between the balls.

But my grid is still the same size. Or is it?

Did my watch break, or did someone move the tube station?

People will buy the iPad instead of a MacBook because the iPad has Applications.

My initial reaction was “how daft”. A laptop running MacOSX, or Windows, has access to billions of application, built through the ages. It’s ridiculous to think that there could be more applications available to a souped-up mobile phone.

But it immediately struck me that he had a point. Shareware died in the land of sophisticated web browsers, and the proliferation of viruses and spamware. Thinking back, they were awful. “Proper” software, like Office or Photoshop is priced beyond the realm of individuals.

Really, I can’t believe that we missed it for so long. What people wanted was a safe, reliable, place where they could spend pocket money on little apps that were beautifully built. They found it in the App store. And you know what? I think Apple underestimated it too. Otherwise there would be an App Store for MacBooks.

• So there’s a review process, hated by developers. But equally, there’s no spamware.
• There’s no multi-tasking. But equally, there’s no battery intensive, memory-hogging, background-running daemons.
• Apps costs money. But Apple already has your card details from signing you up to iTunes. They had a micro-payments model, beating Facebook and Paypal (whose customers have been begging for one) by miles. £1.50? That’s only half a pint these days. No problem.

In the land of the laptop, the only competitor (excluding webapps and shareware), is the widgets. We have widgets for weather, clocks, telling the time, calendars, weather forecasts, clocks, and the weather. Handy.

It’s here that I’d like to see the App Store. Why can’t I drop an iPhone app onto my dashboard (or sidebar)?

The iWork for iPad apps are $10 each and will be available at the iTunes App Store.

2) I expect you to allow me to deauthorize a computer remotely. For example, I’ve just lost my hard disc. How do I deauthorize it? You tell me I’ve got 5 out of my 5 computers authorized. Ok, which ones? Unlike 1975, five is not a big number of computers. How about automatically deauthorizing a computer after 12 months?

3) I expect you to tell me that I can’t play HD films on a non-approved TV BEFORE I buy it. Or, to be honest, never. I’ve never heard of such ridiculous bullshit. I’m not about to go and buy a new TV, just because it doesn’t have your DRM built in.
The discussion here has 8 pages, and the last one says “Apple Support has no idea this problem exists.”
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8472731

4) If I tell you I own an MP3 I expect you to trust me. Allow me to copy and transfer it like any other file.

We like our iPods, we love our iPhones, and when our wives aren’t looking, we might secretly give our MacBooks a cuddle. But no-one likes iTunes. And not because it’s a bad idea. It’s just clunky and unusable.

If I were the EU, I would consider Apple bundling iTunes in the same light as Windows bundling Internet Explorer. Let’s start the fine running at €1m/day and start talking openness.

Here, I’ve worked on websites for Hewlett Packard, the Cannes Film Festival, Persil, Nicquitin, General Motors, Opel, Vauxhall, Sega‘s TotalWar, Nakheel and the Palm Jumeirah, Bayer‘s Xarelto, MSD’s Propecia, Procter & Gamble, Eukanuba, Digitas of course, and a few sites so cool, I still can’t tell you about them.
That’s not a bad record.
Estimates suggest that on average*, I have been involved with more than seventeen percent of your household purchases , and although I have a three-percent chance of killing you with a car, there’s an extra four percent chance of saving your life after an operation.

Somehow I’ve been sent to Brussels, Warsaw, Geneva, Minsk, Basle, Kiev, Zurich, Paris and Bangalore.

Ninety-two of my facebook friends, I met through Digitas. That’s sixty-one percent.

Since I joined Digitas, I’ve started and finished a three-year degree in Physical Science, with a two:one. I’ve got married, and twenty-five percent of my guests were from Digitas. I’ve run twenty-six point one miles in the London marathon, and they helped me raise three-hundred pounds for the NSPCC.

I loved working here.
I wish them all a great 2010.

Kenneth

* some estimates may be approximate to the point of complete fiction.

Actually, it’s really only annoying because it was expensive.

What happened was this: I moved a sizeable set of sites over from my previous standard hosting to the Amazon EC2 set. It was LAMP based, but I’m not going to tell you which site, because it was built a long time ago and hasn’t had enough TLC recently.

The site was suffering from some pretty terrible response times. Using a top to find the slow process seemed to give me no clues at all, and yet the cloudwatch service was showing consistently high CPU usage.

The site is database driven, and that work is quite intensive. Each page on the site executes several queries, and there is a chatroom which drums the database on a regular basis. But the site doesn’t do much else. And so my culprit was obvious: the database.

I’d read about Amazon RDS and it seemed the perfect solution. There’s no denying that my database is relational, it’s almost the textbook relational example, and so RDS beat Simple DB any day of the week. It was cool to have my own EC2 instance running MySQL, but really, Amazon can be a bit complicated with backups and storage. The thought of carefree backups, and a consistent long-running database as I toggled between application servers definitely appealed. I have a new site to roll out? Easy. I run a new server in parallel, and switch the IP across when it’s tested. Dream scenario, right?

And so it seemed. The cost seemed a little high, but I had high hopes for the performance, and it was still less than our (3 year old) prior hosting. I followed the Amazon online setup guide together with someone’s step-by-step tutorial (since sadly the console did not support RDS yet).

Except that it wasn’t much faster. “Shit”, I thought. That was a waste of time. But that’s ok – I now can toggle between different instances of application server, and figure out the problem there without worrying about the database at all. The site was fast enough to leave it running for a week to “bed in”.

One week later, a spring in my step, time to get working on the application. This is working out well. Database still intact, Cloudwatch says CPU load still high, so the blame must be with the PHP not the MySQL. Ok, fair enough. And a quick check of the running costs, gives me $400, not bad for the …

No, wait, go back to that bit again.

Four hundred dollars? A WEEK?

WHAT. THE. DUCK.

That’s over twenty grand a year. Sucre.
My fingers have rarely moved as fast as they did to get that server switched back.

So what happened?
It turned out that I’d been charged for the bandwidth between the app server and the database. And in that week, I’d racked up a terabyte of data. That sounds like a lot, but like I say, this was a DB-heavy site. And actually, you never really look at the bandwidth to your DB do you? It’s not what I would consider “external bandwidth”, which is what Amazon charge for.

After a very stressful couple of hours, I had a medium size instance (high cpu) running, with a clean Ubuntu install and Apache PHP MySQL on top. Performance was back to proper levels (so the PHP just needed another processor), and the costs were back down.

I sent a message to Amazon asking what had happened, and whether I could have my money back. Answer: not on your nelly. You used the bandwidth, you pay the price.

I protest. “Come on”, I say, “I’m not sure what happened here”. I’m a loyal customer and they could at least be generous on this. A bit of faith in the newly-subscribed. Better than that, I paid up and reserved an instance to demostrate my commitment. Just drop the week’s charges, I asked.

My question was passed to management. Not on your nelly, they said. You used the bandwidth, you pay the price. Your bandwidth was cross continent, they say.

AHHHHHHHHH.

Now I get it. My servers were naturally in Europe. Obviously I’d omitted the step of putting my RDS instance in Europe too, and it had defaulted to the US. Bollocks. I moved 1TB of data across the ocean because of a silly oversight.

Of course, it would’ve been nice if the setup commands had mentioned this.
It would’ve been nice if they had added RDS to the console, so I could see this (seriously, they can develop a distributed database system, but haven’t got the time for a bit of HTML?)
It would’ve been much better if they’d alerted me as I switched from a $1,000 setup to a $20,000 setup.
Not much to ask.

And really, it’s not much to ask for my $400 back. Ok, so I got it wrong. But where’s the love?

He was just some kid in an older class who knew how to code the BBC micros that littered the computer room with the heavy metal door. This guy was a genius. Except he wasn’t really. He just learned a lot of stuff from old type-ins in BBC micro magazines. You’d describe him as the guy with glasses, but he didn’t wear glasses. You get the picture.

One of the most astonishing things I saw was that he abbreviated every single command he typed in, which was allowed, using a dot. Instead of typing “BASIC”, you could type “BA.”. My favourite was that he typed “RU.” instead of “RUN”. Eh? You haven’t even saved yourself a keystroke there. What was the point?

The point was showing off that he knew the shortcuts, and was therefore cleverer than us.
Trouble is, we couldn’t learn what was going on. What did RU. mean to us? Russia?

I was reminded of this ancient experience from a recent Django tutorial or two.

When you’re learning Django, there seem to be two common experiences. One is the “you should read the python and django manuals, become an expert in the field, then come back and ask again” response. The guys seem to be doing a lot to make the project more open, and I’m seeing fewer of these which is good. To me, Django is a window into the world of Python. It’s the shiney box that has brought me into Python coding, and even to owning and working on a Mac.

The second common learning experience is the tutorial. Trouble is, I think a lot of the tutorials have been written by the same shortcut guy I met at school. It’s great to see that there’s a generic rendering view for objects, but really, when I’m starting out, I want to do things the lengthy way. I want repetitive views coming out of my ears until I’m familiar enough with the concept to move on to generic reusable code.

I have a successful Django project under my belt. It’s live, I’m happy and I can say it doesn’t use any clever shortcut generic shennanigans. Maybe one day, I’ll get a high-enough view to be able to do that, but actually I’m not sure I need to. Every time I generify, I lose future flexibity, and a hell of a lot of readability.

My colleague here always bleats about the Hello World programs of today. He describes them as “look! there’s a pony!”.
Let’s get back to really basic tutorials.

NB. The RTFM folks will be telling me to contribute to the tutorials. They probably have a point.

The result is “Confessions of a T-Shirt”. Follow this link to have a look:
Funny T Shirts

I think we’ve got a few learnings to share. I’ll report on it later.

For now, I’ll sign off with great thanks to my two friends who’ve helped me through this mighty effort: coffee and dropbox. I appreciate it.
Oh, and cheers to the other lads too.