Multi-threading multi-core chips. i.e. 100+ cores, are really going to change computing, yet again. I love nearly everything about technology except that it gets so old so quickly. #frustrating. However, the net needs speed. Humans hate lack of speed, they hate sluggish systems, so this is good news that we are going to see another performance leap.

I moved my personal blog to WordPress.com. I used to self host. Why did I change?

1. To start to repay WordPress.org for their fantastic product which they have always made freely available (i’m paying them now).
2. Outsource some aspects of security. It’s always better to have someone with thousands of customers and a lot to lose, thinking and acting on security for you. Self hosting is higher risk in my opinion.
3. It’s one less thing I have to manage. I want to consume and produce content, not manage applications. While I self host you could call me a hypocrite, and fairly so! I’m always telling people to use software as a service or cloud services where you aren’t hosting your own software or applications.
4. They have some really nice themes that take seconds to implement. I like to change themes regularly to give things a fresh makeover. Blogs who maintain the same look and feel get a bit stale, but that’s just me.
5. People who do stuff for free are just plain cool in my book, they are better than me, much better, they are the selfless unsung heroes of the tech world that we will one day remember as the pioneers who took the risk, rebuffed the capitalist system and went in a direction others were too scared or too selfish to take. Yes they did build a financial model around community to make it viable, and that’s ok. I’d rather them do that and survive.

1. Your Album will look split like this.

2. Two finger click (right click windows) to open the option menu and select Get Info -or- you can bulk edit by selecting all the songs you want to edit by highlighting them. Then load the Get Info window.

3. Add an Album Artist. This is the name that will bind all the tracks.

Great infographics have been produced by Edward Tufte, Megan Jaegerman (above graphic) and others. However, as infographics grow in popularity as a method of communication we are seeing shockgraphics evolve that are really just agenda based design. They are identifiable by the lack of scientific approach, big fonts, oversized icons or reliance on 3D. Generally they are politically or marketing motivated.

The recent spate of shockgraphics are designed to elicit an emotional response. Instead Tufte and Jaegerman display information in an enjoyable and educative way. They achieve this by helping people make unemotional judgement, making it interesting and also visually appealing all in one. Data should always be relative and clear of chartjunk. Without relativity there is no benchmark or position of judgement.

Here’s an example of a shockgraphic based on the US unfunded debt.

Instead, if I said that this debt is a big as all of the molecules on the surface of a pin head -or- that it’s the equivalent of a debt repayable until retirement of $25 per week per US citizen then it’s not quite as scary or interesting. This isn’t to say the US doesn’t have a debt problem, it does.

By not providing the reader with relative information to allow you to benchmark their conclusive representation it becomes a misleading graphic. It just becomes a FUD graphic.

Good infographics should give data a powerful voice and not an emotive one that shouts at you.

1. Increasing use of AI
2. Geo spatial on many devices
3. Social mapping
4. More data format standardisation
5. Less players in the industry

I also put down what I thought web interfaces would be doing:

1. More user definition of application components
2. More skinning/themes
3. Freemium, free and paid model continues
4. Colour rich or minimilist UI designs. A bar-belling of design complexity.

I think I did ok on most of these but I think the two that didn’t eventuate are “less players in the industry”. I was referring here to online invoicing/accounting systems. There are a lot more now but i’d argue it’s a long tail and many don’t trade while still having their apps in maintenance mode.

The second which is appearing more an more, but far from prolific, even in our own application Saasu, is user definition of application components. It’s still in the domain of Salesforce via the Force.com platform. It’s also evident in Saasu’s programmable “Themes” feature used to define templates and the ability to lightly customise the dashboard. I think where I got this wrong was that core components are still being added. It’s taken a lot longer for the industry to webify accounting software than we all expected.

I’ve read The Power of Less by Leo Babauta twice now. It really cuts to the point of simplicity and the impact on productivity it can cause. Dropping a simplicity nuke into your life/business could have a big impact.

The crux of the book is identify the essential and eliminate the rest. The idea being that you are essentially knocking off the most important things first on your list and so on. Many people and organisations run with dozens of projects, tasks or work in parallel. Babauta argues for a more serial approach which I agree with. In many ways this is very similar to using Pareto’s principal to help you decide what to work on next in your projects or life that will cause the biggest impact for the smallest use of available resource. This approach also allows you to operate in a state of flow and actively tries to remove the interruption tax that causes much of the poor productivity you can see in office environments.

Image credit: Smemon

• Automation is more than machines doing work for you. It’s about MACHINES and HUMANS following RULES religiously.
• Keeping multiple todo lists is very bad. That would then be a list of lists = FAIL. One work list and one personal list is plenty.
• Coincidental results are when you shift your approach to a task in such a way that it causes other tasks to be completed or progressed.
• Relying on memory = FAIL. Write down enough that you can act on. Do you write down phone numbers and later look at them in mystery?
• A few big theme based spreadsheets with more tabs trumps lots of single tab spreadsheets.
• Search your email to find emails don’t file them. Mind shift » Search is in effect treating every piece of text in an email as a folder/label.
• I need one many of these (pictured)

• iPad non-porn by Bob Parson’s marketing machine at GoDaddy.
• Tech Zealots and how to spot them in the wild.
• Megashark infographic. It’s the absolute truth.
• Without civil liberties, government is just a criminal racket by Stilgherrian
• The secret to great work is great play – so that would mean it’s no-longer work, right?