On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

See a summer fade in your shirking eyes
An’ see the moon hidden behind a steely sky
Lustful gazes back on a time long in the past
Wondrous thoughts of all that’s come to pass
An’ it’s all coming to go so it can flow
Run down and fly to another time – another place
I see all their faces, all those haunting places
And we’re all getting older in winter’s sun
Growing colder in the shadows of fleeting clouds

…to be continued in Memoirs of a Time

I quite enjoy this section of Newsnight on a Friday evening which sups up the finer bits of culture in the form of the arts. I always have a chuckle at the three or four guests they have on and their poses, it says so much about them before they have even opened their mouths

I wonder what would happen if I was on it? Actually I know already, people might get confused at how ’serious’ my writing is but how apparently laugh-a-minute I am otherwise.

Anyway, I have a few things to catch up on after seeing Jimmy Carr this week, he was awesome and I got picked on but then I was right at the front and well I said something and it set him off and I have no idea what it was I said, I was a bit sloshed ) It was great though! Different style of comedy to my usual type as he seems to tell jokes and gags whereas my humour taste is more extended pieces, stories if you will.

Meanwhile I have to hone my Queen’s English, ‘Yuhsss Oh Abs-ilootlee, I agree,’ (Oh Christ the opinions they are clashing as I write!) rather than my usual, ‘Yasss um it’s great totally agree dude!’ Which you’ll agree is very different from my written prose–mind you I’m even more ’sloven’ at the moment as I am totally shattered.

This weekend I started working on my new super duper sixty quid PC. It’s a solid bit of kit. Anyway, I’ve been following a book that has been really helping me out with getting my head around AJAX technologies.

I think I’ve hit the hardest part of the learning curve which is getting my head around how it all hangs together which now I do. Now I’ve got my head around how the server interacts with the client it all makes perfect sense. Having the technical knowledge cements that in my mind.  Also it affirms my conviction that so-called AJAX stuff doesn’t on the face of it XMLHttpRequest; like for example edit in place (Flickr is a good example.)

Tonight I’ll review my code I wrote over the weekend as I have to admit I have never really got on too well with Object Orientated coding before, but because Javascript’s OOP model is so simple; it makes perfect sense now. I’m too much of a procedural based code girl Time to move into a new realm. Also I am impressed at actually Javascript is a good language; I’m just adverse to using it with all my accessibility work and huge efforts to make minimal websites.

So, all this is well and good but I have learnt some good stuff to further my skills so I have a project in mind. It’s obviously going to take advantage of AJAX technologies; and it’s just going to be a simple post it note application but a collaborative one with a very basic calendaring backdrop. It’s nothing complex or revolutionary but it might be useful.

Yay!

Usually you’ll hear me talk about Windows here.

This time, I’m talking about Doors. That’s Doors on hinges, not Microsoft’s new operating system… Or Diana Dors for that matter.

Today I have been finishing off the bits in the bathroom I haven’t as of today got around to painting, that being the door frame. Always one to do a job properly, I didn’t do what the previous occupier did and paint over the hinges etc. and do a crap job I decided to rub down the frame properly. And I’m sniffing like a fucker, not because I’ve done some coke but because of the sawdust. ) Or so I am told. Anyway.

I took the door of its hinges to rub down the wood, clean it up, get rid of all the dust and also to clean up the hinges themselves.

Could I get the <Brian Potter>frigger</Brian Potter> back on? Not on your life I couldn’t.

I have now though what a complete and bloody load of arse!

I don’t as a principle post embedded video on blog entries but Dream Catch Me from Newton Faulkner is an exception. He was at V Festival this year and I am now gutted I missed him.

This is the perfect song, and this is what I wrote about a month ago for Memoirs of a Time which had the song ruminating at the back of my mind:

It was along a sorry road I travelled on a seemingly endless journey north, driving under the occluded skies of the A23, north through Bolney’s shifting twisting turns that become the kink and curvature of Handcross Hill. The car’s engine roared in third gear rising to the peak of the hill and into fourth. Misery’s rain pelted down from tempestuous early morn’ clouds and raindrops slid down the windshield. Even for a British summer the weather was uncharacteristically foul. A violin played in my broken mind. A shattered bleeding heart inside and the obfuscation of an inky dawn misted my mind on the highway…

…”The Lakes!” I said to myself as I passed a sign on the M6, “I shall go there.” So the beautiful Lake District was my destination, and I was all too aware I had just spoke to myself to confirm my impulses inside…

…The Lakes were my dearest hope that peace to quell the thunder in my heart would come. I just needed to calm down; inhale the crystalline air and listen to platitude; feel clear sparkling water run through my thoughts, that would cleanse and quench my thirst and resolve my war.

excerpts from ‘Northern Links’ – Memoirs of a Time
Copyright ©2007 Victoria J. K. Lamburn

I heard it when I was driving northbound on the M6 in late July to the Lake District as I cut through the Lune Gorge which is one of the most dramatic drives you can take. Anyone who knows what my mindscape was like at the time (I was in a bad place…) you’ll see why this had touched me so much and now I finally know who it’s by… This is beautiful:

I won’t go into this one in a big way as I’m still taking it in. That said, as much as I openly put my foot down to outright Microsoft bashing (and there is a lot of it) they also manage to come up with just as much baloney sometimes.

Recently Stephen Shankland over at CNET News enquired with a certain Clint Patterson to what extent it embraced competition from say Thunderbird (an email client) and also to assisting the developers with Exchange server support.

The open-source development model has yet to demonstrate the ability to support profitable software businesses that can drive the coordinated research and testing necessary to sustain innovation…

On the face of it that’s a fairly sensible comment if you purely look at things from the perspective that research and innovation can only occur with financial inputs. Notice also the clever drop in of ‘coordinated’ in that sentence to suggest that open-source projects lack co-ordination. In some sense that has certainly been true, but it’s now not quite the case as the Ubuntu project shows that the effectiveness of open source collaboration and coordination is no longer the disaster zone it once was.

Ok so on what grounds am I arguing against Mr. Patterson? I think it’s related to what I wrote last night; that there are many other forces behind the innovation on the web front nowadays, more than anything: passion. And maybe ‘profit’ looking at it from the word’s etymology is not just about a financial profit, but a profit of goodwill, support, emerging community, openness, user directed control.

And is support purely a carrot dangling on the end of the string? Or rather ponying up the dough (money up front) to get people to work on such things. No. What open source does very well is foster innovation by people who have a genuine passion to hack away into the night as it were, and do it just for the love of it. Apart from a ego massage, what other incentive do open source developers have? It has to be their passion for creating the wonderful software that they do.

If anything web development is partially open source because whilst it’s an unspoken truth to say that our designs may sometimes pass a resemblance to something we saw elsewhere and liked a lot–that is what happens. That’s design and art forms. Having influences that guide us to the next stage. Coders may peek into the source to look at various techniques and whilst Ctrl + C is not the solution so to speak (that’s copy, not break!) but we are influenced by the implementation. Even reading people’s websites, blogs and forum comments on how to solve a bloody Internet Explorer 6 layout issue is an open form of collaboration; we aren’t downloading proprietary binary objects to solve the problem; we are sharing the solutions and ideas in geek readable form!

Is this not in effect an open source model? Whilst I’m not saying we should now go and create a direct copy of say Flickr, some users may already be thinking, I wish it did this and that, and they’ll probably go and do it and be influenced by Flickr but they won’t necessarily leech the code; various parts of the process (design, code prototyping, implementation etc.) will be influenced by what has gone before. It’s an art form, and the creative person will have their influences and then chuck it in a pot, mix it up and have something that’s their own. It’s like my writing: my big influences include Jack Kerouac, JG Ballard and Will Self; but I’m not writing books exactly how Kerouac would. I’m not copying his words. They’re at the back of my mind when I write, as are the influences I get from everywhere. Web design is the same, be it code or visual–it has influences that whether it’s for a public, private or open entity–the same work practice has gone into it.

Can you honestly say that you have written a piece of code that hasn’t had even a minor influence in implementation or reason of coding it in the first place? (e.g. x didn’t work so I decided to start on this: y; to the solve the problem.) Can you say you sat in a dark room for a year and then designed a website (appearance) that had no influences at all but only your own concoction? Probably not. In fact as a writer I like identifying the prose that has influences from my favourite authors: like I say might call a certain sentence very Kerouac inspired (’Go cry…’) or perhaps Will Self (I was impressed with the writing on the A41(M) and the mention of Lutyens… yes I know this shit man! It made it OK to write about Owen Williams’ bridges of the future–that’s the original 1959 bridges on the M1, OK?…) etc.

Maybe the web developer should be able to say, my design is influenced by the aesthetic of Flickr, the usability of Google based applications (which always have an aesthetic of their own)–and so forth.

So to wrap up, where does this leave Mr. Patterson’s statement? The point is that profit isn’t just about financial gains, there are profits from open source that we can all benefit from. Profits such as fostering the ability to contribute, be in control and do something yourself in the vein of your influences to communicate what you want to. Innovation sometimes seems to be seen as copying features from Windows, or Mac OS X and any other direction within that and some of it will. Apple did with what they saw at Xerox and Microsoft inevitably did with what they saw from Apple. But it’s putting your own spin on it. Can Flickr be called a bootleg or copy of what Yahoo! Photos was? No, it does the same thing but with its own spin on it. Operating systems do the same. Innovation will always sprout so long as someone has the ability to think, the ability to do it, the will to communicate and the passion to drive them there–regardless of the financial incentive to do so.

For this reason, I believe Mr. Patterson’s statement on the front of it is reasonable if a slightly dated view, and a very close minded view of what is needed to drive innovation. After all, I don’t remember there being any financial incentive when fire was ‘invented’?

Think outside of the box there are many other reasons aside from money. I’m not saying open source will beat Microsoft one day, maybe it will, maybe it won’t? Does it matter? The point is that the success of the web over the past ten years proves that open collaborative environments can foster innovation and do so incredibly successfully without precluding the financial gains that may come from it, but neither is it a prerequisite in my view. I.e. I could create something fantastic website and advertise and promote it for free (bar my ADSL monthly fee) and it might just gain traction. After all, it’s not exactly big well known brands and corporations behind some of the Web ‘2.0′ successes; though eventually they do become them themselves.

The web has levelled the playing field of opportunity. Maybe Open Source will do the same for the computer’s local environment; and maybe with the playing field levelled, that is what Microsoft is having a harder time of getting their heads around and how to leverage it for their business model.

Note, this is a long heartfelt blog post. It’s not the usual web evangelism angle but a unique one. Whether you give it the time of day is neither here or there but the matter remains–what I’ve written here means a lot to me.

Interesting is how I would call the past couple of months or so. I don’t tend to write personal stuff on this blog because I don’t think this is the place. That said that wasn’t the case even just a couple of months ago when I wrote far too much personal stuff which has now been channelled into Memoirs of a Time:

I finished as soon as I could in the service station [Knutsford on the M6] and dashed back out into the rain to fumble with my keys getting them into the door lock, jumping into my steel cocoon and just sat cowering. Everywhere I went there was a superlative in human form to compare myself to. The end result was a lasting impression of inferiority. The Lakes were my dearest hope that peace to quell the thunder in my heart would come. I just needed to calm down; inhale the crystalline air and listen to platitude; feel clear sparkling water run through my thoughts, that would cleanse and quench my thirst and resolve my war.

from Memoirs of a Time “Northern Links” by Victoria J.K. Lamburn

The thunder was quelled and since then I have really got back on track with so many things. One of those is really taking a good hard look at what’s happening in the world of web development and ultimately the career I absolutely love with a passion.

This isn’t an exercise in bragging though; rather an explanation in my words of something I have ‘hit’ that has been a part as much as anything in digging myself out of the rut I had got into this year up until mid July.

I was talking to Cotia (one of my best mates) the other night over what soon ended up almost three bottles of wine between us (didn’t feel drunk at all, quite odd, felt very tired the next day and still paying…) and we were talking about when we started University in 2002; by which point I got really excited because that is exactly what I wrote about (although about September 2007 rather than October 2002) is that Autumnal air that we all feel press down on our shoulders, like a familiar face leaning over your shoulder radiating a perverse warmth in the cold biting air.

I am a very reflective person, I value halcyon, I harbour the past with me even when I look forward half of me looks over my shoulder with a smile. I’ll always be like this, and I like being like it. I look back on that innocuous and mundane time of waiting for a train at Moulsecoomb station in Brighton in October, in the afternoon of a dawning winter with the perfectness of fading light. So what is it that I’ve hit?

Nothing bad but something to look forward to. Earlier this month I went to the Barcamp in Brighton which was a real eye opener. Not so much on the technical front which was just phenomenal some of things that are being done with the web a mere 12 years after I got into creating my first web page. (In 1995, things were primitive and in my case it was an Amiga 1200 running AMosaic in 640×512 resolution. Yes, not the first but I was there in the days of NCSA Mosaic. *takes a geeky bow*)

The thing that took me aback was actually how much of a community circuit seems to revolve in the web development game and how deeply collaborative it can be. I’m very much a share and share alike person (there are reasons aside from price to be an exclusive Linux user) and I was impressed by this. In fact the collaborative nature of the beast wasn’t purely one upmanship but seemingly the product of passion. When you use a website, have you considered whether the people/person behind it was thinking, “I really want them to enjoy this site, I hope they like it.” Passion, flair, creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, exactitude and dynamism is what drives the web economy and its this marvelous afterglow that makes the Dotcom burst of 2000/2001 seem not a surprise but an inevitability of naievty in the market at that time. Now there seems something so much more soulful behind the motivation of the true pioneers. (I’m not one of those, I follow once the path is well trod–I suppose I’m the Slackware of web developers!)

Notice I am hesitant to say ‘Web 2.0′ as it’s become almost a joke in itself but when you cut through the hype and increasingly nonsensical descriptions, I personally can see the marked difference in the web of today to that of even 3 years ago. In three years time? That’s the buzz, that’s the excitement. What other industry is on the cutting edge of enterprise like that of the web developer?

I’ve hit that realisation that whilst I don’t hope to really create the next killer web app, or killer web site, it’s reinvigorated an enthusiasm inside of me that is just sitting there with me when I write that first line…

<!DOCTYPE html...

Isn’t that a wonderful feeling!

I suppose there is only one thing more that I love more than designing and coding websites, and that’s writing:

At the same time with the flowing patience was a lowered tone in my subvocal thoughts that enunciated my conviction’s brevity to every syllable. That dreadful Monday night changed from the most terrifying of storm clouds to the gentle drifting wisps in the sky whose shadows did not leave me in the shade. Because soon whichever way fate played it, I knew at last I could be free of everything that had raged inside of me, all of that which has brought me down at the slightest faltering step.

from Memoirs of a Time “Elysium” by Victoria J.K. Lamburn

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/21/reg40_launch/

Sausage, beans and mash. I just had to laugh at this one.

I have to admit I chuckled after watching Newsnight (see I’m not all about Hollyoaks, I am intellectual really!) when the dog started kicking off as Paxman was winding up. You could hear it barking and growling through the end credits. Did make me chuckle!

Ok, I a Hollyoaks fan because actually it’s a pretty good soap; but soaps compared to other genres might not be that great… Anyway.

Claire Cunningham. She’s not dead. Why can’t the bitch just die a horrible death! (nothing against Gemma Bissix who plays her, she’s very good!) ARGHHHHH!

Let me reiterate that. ARGHHHHH!

Ok now now back to higher cultured themes and thoughts.

…ARGHHHHH!