Over the years bedbugs in London have become a serious problem which the government has shown no sign of doing anything about. It is certainly an epidemic and very few website seem to have any clear and useful information
I found this report which I found quite good and reasonably informative.
It also helped to confirm that Permethrin based aerosols like Raid Ant and Cockroach Killer do actually kill bed bugs. When tested it however did seem to require 2 sprays from a distance of 50cm to kill my 'special friends'. Perhaps this is why the report mentions increased resistance?
Anyhow its way more effective than anything else I know at the moment and is available at supermarkets so kill kill kill!
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Red Dead Remdemption
Wow is this a game changer (another poor pun!) from Rockstar. This game brings you to the wild west in a big way. Its stunning, check out some demos on youtube partner.
But... £38? Only of PS3 and Xbox. Oh darn it. I'll just have to wait.
Until then I'm going to buy this:
Collection: Good Bad Ugly/Fistful Of Dollars/Few Dollars More/Hang Em High its about £8. A damn good deal.
See you down at the staging post.
But... £38? Only of PS3 and Xbox. Oh darn it. I'll just have to wait.
Until then I'm going to buy this:
Collection: Good Bad Ugly/Fistful Of Dollars/Few Dollars More/Hang Em High its about £8. A damn good deal.
See you down at the staging post.
Murdoch has lost already
Rupert Murdoch, a modern media mogul?
Nope he's lost it. Probably he lost it a long time ago. Murdoch vs the Internet. The battle line has been drawn. All the old media will probably back him but they also lost a long time ago as well. I have noted recently there has been a trend of old media being highly opinionated about the internet and how its free etc. The internet works by advertising full-stop. Subscription services in the main have failed. Murdochs idea that suddenly the Times will be charging is idiotic. The Times was immensely successful online but note that FT has struggled and so will the Times. Murdochs words: we're going to stop Google, Microsoft and whoever, taking our stories for nothing.
Excuse the news flash pun: They are not your stories Murdoch, this sort of reality TV is an event that many report on and many can comment on. Its not entertainment content so you can't copyright it as an event. All you can do is force people to pay for your apparently biased version of it. However you will kill your service.
Why do these companies fight the internet when its too late instead of investing in the net and getting there before time? Because they dont employ internet savy strategists who could gaze the crystal ball.
Whats the 'Next Step' Mr Murdoch. Legal actions? Sue the Internet. Feed the lawyers? How about hiring a few product people and turning your ship around before you become sideline corp.
No game for you in the big league.
PS: Am still stunned by his comments: Times is anti jewish, Obama controls what goes on the New York times ??? Is Murdoch the last reality TV program?
Nope he's lost it. Probably he lost it a long time ago. Murdoch vs the Internet. The battle line has been drawn. All the old media will probably back him but they also lost a long time ago as well. I have noted recently there has been a trend of old media being highly opinionated about the internet and how its free etc. The internet works by advertising full-stop. Subscription services in the main have failed. Murdochs idea that suddenly the Times will be charging is idiotic. The Times was immensely successful online but note that FT has struggled and so will the Times. Murdochs words: we're going to stop Google, Microsoft and whoever, taking our stories for nothing.
Excuse the news flash pun: They are not your stories Murdoch, this sort of reality TV is an event that many report on and many can comment on. Its not entertainment content so you can't copyright it as an event. All you can do is force people to pay for your apparently biased version of it. However you will kill your service.
Why do these companies fight the internet when its too late instead of investing in the net and getting there before time? Because they dont employ internet savy strategists who could gaze the crystal ball.
Whats the 'Next Step' Mr Murdoch. Legal actions? Sue the Internet. Feed the lawyers? How about hiring a few product people and turning your ship around before you become sideline corp.
No game for you in the big league.
PS: Am still stunned by his comments: Times is anti jewish, Obama controls what goes on the New York times ??? Is Murdoch the last reality TV program?
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Small note this time.
Want to see what we thought of Iraq before all this US war gubbins?
The British Pathe website has some interesting footage.
AGELESS IRAQ
For those of you who liked Thesigers book check out the marsh arabs part, wow.
Want to see what we thought of Iraq before all this US war gubbins?
The British Pathe website has some interesting footage.
AGELESS IRAQ
For those of you who liked Thesigers book check out the marsh arabs part, wow.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Gnome is a problem
Gnome has a big problem. They dont do marketing.
A recent post I saw highlighted the lack of product management in open source software. Thats fine but in Gnome's case their basic marketing is really bad. They also have a severe problem with reaching out to developers.
Its been almost 10 years for me of using Gnome and actually in that time I've bought a Mac and use Gnome less and less. I occasionally visit Gnomes home page in the vain hope that something has changed. That there will be a bright screen convincing me with cool screenshots and happy people. That the new features of Gnome will be simply highlighted, the features that are gnomes strong points and the features that it has that other OS's dont.
That day has never arrived.
Gnomes pages continue to drive users away to turn their backs at a jaw dropping public who cant believe the inescapable rudeness. Amazingly the actually OS is no so bad, its even a little more friend IMHO than KDE but to work this out without installing is impossible.
I dont think its good enough for Gnome to say go to the Distro, as actually this is Open source world and these things are modular. KDE is the competition and they do a darn site better job.
My impression is that the Gnome website is not even really for Applicaition Developers either, the documentation of the API is darned poor and has only improved in the last 2 years. Still nothing like Javadoc or google api etc.
So who is the website for. Its for the Gnome club members: the gnome developers themselves. They announce their cool get togethers, the whatever zeitgeist of the moment and we look on in awe from our plexiglass sideline view port.
And the amazing result is that in 10 years: GIMP is practically the only full application designed for Gnome. Sure there are OS apps like Rhythmbox but apart from this?
I'm done
A recent post I saw highlighted the lack of product management in open source software. Thats fine but in Gnome's case their basic marketing is really bad. They also have a severe problem with reaching out to developers.
Its been almost 10 years for me of using Gnome and actually in that time I've bought a Mac and use Gnome less and less. I occasionally visit Gnomes home page in the vain hope that something has changed. That there will be a bright screen convincing me with cool screenshots and happy people. That the new features of Gnome will be simply highlighted, the features that are gnomes strong points and the features that it has that other OS's dont.
That day has never arrived.
Gnomes pages continue to drive users away to turn their backs at a jaw dropping public who cant believe the inescapable rudeness. Amazingly the actually OS is no so bad, its even a little more friend IMHO than KDE but to work this out without installing is impossible.
I dont think its good enough for Gnome to say go to the Distro, as actually this is Open source world and these things are modular. KDE is the competition and they do a darn site better job.
My impression is that the Gnome website is not even really for Applicaition Developers either, the documentation of the API is darned poor and has only improved in the last 2 years. Still nothing like Javadoc or google api etc.
So who is the website for. Its for the Gnome club members: the gnome developers themselves. They announce their cool get togethers, the whatever zeitgeist of the moment and we look on in awe from our plexiglass sideline view port.
And the amazing result is that in 10 years: GIMP is practically the only full application designed for Gnome. Sure there are OS apps like Rhythmbox but apart from this?
I'm done
An interesting case of product failure
I have been reading a few product blogs and came across an interesting comment about why someone switched from Yahoo mail to Gmail: IMAP. I didn't think about this too much but then I realized something. Two things in fact:
A. I switched from Yahoo to Gmail because of IMAP
B. This was a fundamentally stupid thing of Yahoo not to do. How on earth was it that no product roadmap contained 'IMAP' as a feature to implement?
In fact the reason I started reading product blogs was that I could see a number of big software service companies making big mistakes like this.
Why could this happen at Yahoo?
1. Product Manager had no visibility of what was important in the email market.
2. Product Manager was really a Product Marketing person so didn't really understand what IMAP was. I stand beside the statement that good Product Managers know their market and have an appropriate understanding of the platform which delivers product features.
3. Product Manager is a know-nothing political hire from a red brick university and was useful in getting us Accounts AB & C: Fine and dandy but why didn't you hire them as PR or Ambassador or something. Companies like this wind up very top heavy and very output lite. (see Google)
4. Product Manager was totally user driven so didn't see that IMAP standards had firmed up meaning that a holy grail of email would suddenly be possible and huge user demand would occur.
This is a tricky point and one in which a really good Product Manager will shine. Some things you have to use your intuition for. The users wont necessarily know what they want in 6 months or 2 years time and its up to you to ensure its in the roadmap. I think its this point where Yahoo went wrong.
Being a totally user driven product manager will see you waiting for the user to tell you want they want when its too late for you to provide it. This is visible right across Yahoo's product range and frankly in their CEO who like to noise off about what was wrong with the old Yahoo and not focusing on doing something about where the new Yahoo should be in a years time.
Don't get me wrong, user input is vital and certainly for useability testing its important but some things are up to the company to predict and get right because the people that work there are good at doing that. When you receive a large amount of negative user feedback about some feature its a very bad sign as its already too late. Anything that important should have been picked up in the useability part of the process.
So its a mix, being user driven is the easy part. Most users love to say what they don't like in a product, the marketing department can do something useful (instead of trying to get you fired and take your job) and do some surveys and tell you all this. The hard part is that crystal ball magic: predicting what users will want in the future. As a product manager you need to empathise with your users and imagine their needs based on what you know about them today and trends in their markets. Hell, there is no one method to this, its why you've been a product manager for years. Each market has a different way of working so its probably highly dependent on that. Another reason why I dont go for generic product managers and all that 'we fresh air, [I'm trying to hire my friends son]' type rhetoric.
So Yahoo, simple solution- don't hire product managers who are really marketing people. Hire someone who who will tell you the truth and who will talk to you about the entire product and want to know how it fits together. They are trying to understand its dynamics and work out what the needs are in future and how to do todays product more efficiently. Be wary of people who say its not about the technology (especially in software), it usually means they dont want to get their hands dirty and dont want to focus on important issues. You will find out how good they are in another years time when it will be too late.
Google seems to be the opposite: their product manager for Search didn't mention the customer first for a very user driven service. In fact I'd say they did a 'Microsoft Word 2007 meet your new friend Mr Ribbon, he'll be taking over from Mr Paper Clip'
So who does get it right? Apple. In the main Apples products are extremely well executed. Perhaps thats because Steve Jobs is in effect a Product Manager who values all parts of the process from Marketing to Delivery and believes in Innovation. We dont see Apple as a company where users tell Apple how to design its products. No way. Apple inspires through its own good examples of leading the customer by good design and predicting what their base will want. Ask yourself this. Does Apple understand its products, does it care about quality, have those products been checked at a number of quality points?
Think of it another way: does a top furniture design house expect their users to tell them what to design? Does Prada give their customers a pad and ask for a rough sketch? No way. We respect them for knowing what is best for us because they have proven they can do so.
I promote a return to a more design orientated Product Manager for software who needs to understand platforms the way a furniture designer understands materials. Only then will we see on time delivery of features that we want when we want them and not 2 years too late.
I'm done.
A. I switched from Yahoo to Gmail because of IMAP
B. This was a fundamentally stupid thing of Yahoo not to do. How on earth was it that no product roadmap contained 'IMAP' as a feature to implement?
In fact the reason I started reading product blogs was that I could see a number of big software service companies making big mistakes like this.
Why could this happen at Yahoo?
1. Product Manager had no visibility of what was important in the email market.
2. Product Manager was really a Product Marketing person so didn't really understand what IMAP was. I stand beside the statement that good Product Managers know their market and have an appropriate understanding of the platform which delivers product features.
3. Product Manager is a know-nothing political hire from a red brick university and was useful in getting us Accounts AB & C: Fine and dandy but why didn't you hire them as PR or Ambassador or something. Companies like this wind up very top heavy and very output lite. (see Google)
4. Product Manager was totally user driven so didn't see that IMAP standards had firmed up meaning that a holy grail of email would suddenly be possible and huge user demand would occur.
This is a tricky point and one in which a really good Product Manager will shine. Some things you have to use your intuition for. The users wont necessarily know what they want in 6 months or 2 years time and its up to you to ensure its in the roadmap. I think its this point where Yahoo went wrong.
Being a totally user driven product manager will see you waiting for the user to tell you want they want when its too late for you to provide it. This is visible right across Yahoo's product range and frankly in their CEO who like to noise off about what was wrong with the old Yahoo and not focusing on doing something about where the new Yahoo should be in a years time.
Don't get me wrong, user input is vital and certainly for useability testing its important but some things are up to the company to predict and get right because the people that work there are good at doing that. When you receive a large amount of negative user feedback about some feature its a very bad sign as its already too late. Anything that important should have been picked up in the useability part of the process.
So its a mix, being user driven is the easy part. Most users love to say what they don't like in a product, the marketing department can do something useful (instead of trying to get you fired and take your job) and do some surveys and tell you all this. The hard part is that crystal ball magic: predicting what users will want in the future. As a product manager you need to empathise with your users and imagine their needs based on what you know about them today and trends in their markets. Hell, there is no one method to this, its why you've been a product manager for years. Each market has a different way of working so its probably highly dependent on that. Another reason why I dont go for generic product managers and all that 'we fresh air, [I'm trying to hire my friends son]' type rhetoric.
So Yahoo, simple solution- don't hire product managers who are really marketing people. Hire someone who who will tell you the truth and who will talk to you about the entire product and want to know how it fits together. They are trying to understand its dynamics and work out what the needs are in future and how to do todays product more efficiently. Be wary of people who say its not about the technology (especially in software), it usually means they dont want to get their hands dirty and dont want to focus on important issues. You will find out how good they are in another years time when it will be too late.
Google seems to be the opposite: their product manager for Search didn't mention the customer first for a very user driven service. In fact I'd say they did a 'Microsoft Word 2007 meet your new friend Mr Ribbon, he'll be taking over from Mr Paper Clip'
So who does get it right? Apple. In the main Apples products are extremely well executed. Perhaps thats because Steve Jobs is in effect a Product Manager who values all parts of the process from Marketing to Delivery and believes in Innovation. We dont see Apple as a company where users tell Apple how to design its products. No way. Apple inspires through its own good examples of leading the customer by good design and predicting what their base will want. Ask yourself this. Does Apple understand its products, does it care about quality, have those products been checked at a number of quality points?
Think of it another way: does a top furniture design house expect their users to tell them what to design? Does Prada give their customers a pad and ask for a rough sketch? No way. We respect them for knowing what is best for us because they have proven they can do so.
I promote a return to a more design orientated Product Manager for software who needs to understand platforms the way a furniture designer understands materials. Only then will we see on time delivery of features that we want when we want them and not 2 years too late.
I'm done.
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