Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

This post originally appeared on my Conchango Blog in 2007.

Conchango has been working intensively over the past two months with Microsoft and Associated Newspapers to create an application that allows users to to read the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday using advanced screen reading technology. The application launches today. It has been dubbed “The eReader”.

The application is built on .NET3 and uses XAML and WPF for presentation.

We’ve been running a mixed team of Conchango and Associated staff at their palatial offices in Kensington. Lots of people at Conchango have been keen to be involved on the project as it has been very exciting to work on this new technology. Amongst them have been Howard van Roojen, Martin Rennie, John Rayner, Stuart Preston, Richard Wand,Hiia Immonen and Keni Barwick. Unsurprisingly, you’ll probably notice that a few of these people have started blogging about WPF and Vista!

The project aims to place the Daily Mail at the vanguard of Vista (could I trademark this alliteration?). The Mail will be the only newspaper in Europe that fields an application of this kind for an exclusive period.

Some of you may recognise this kind of application from the New York Times Reader. It is based on the same technology as the NYT reader and we’ve been working with the same Microsoft team in Seattle that built the reflow and reading technology.

The eReader application allows a user to download and cache up to seven days news on his or her laptop/ tablet PC or Ultra-mobile PC. Minimum requirements are Windows XP SP2, a 1Ghz processor and a 512Mb RAM. Once the news is cached, it can be read even when not connected to the Internet and presents the news in a format that is easy on the eye and can be scaled to fit the device it is being read on. A “News in Pictures” feature allows the user to browse the news visually and then dive right into the story. Vista-only functionality includes a sidebar gadget and a “Speak the News” feature. Stylistically, it looks very like the Daily Mail, with a managed “tabloid feel” frontpage and Daily Mail fonts throughout.

The eReader project’s been an intensive 2 months of work. We originally came in at the end of November and ran incredibly short sprints of initially 1-week each. This was because we were unsure of what the new technology was capable of and wanted to control the risk as much as possible. We moved onto 2-week sprints soon after we started. Even 2-week sprints are incredibly tough to manage and to work within. Balancing off short sprints with pretty large milestones has been an interesting opportunity to make good use of the sublime coffee shop here at Associated New

I found this today, quite by chance and thought it was clever – a nice diagrammatical representation of observation versus revelation. Please click on the image to enlarge it:

How productive are you?

Is your second home a desk?

Do you put the hours in?

Are you passionate enough about your job?

Will you go the extra mile?

Maybe these people are committed and passionate. Or maybe they’re just terrified about getting sacked. Or maybe they’re burning the candle at both ends: doing charity work maybe, or training for a triathlon.

But then the news tells us that we work the longest hours in Europe and we’re not necessarily the most productive either.

So now that we’re all on this hamster wheel, consider this: We’re running to keep still.

That’s right – I’d say we’ve been a little conned by the social revolution. Now both partners work, and earn potentially twice that of one partner, but prices have increased as well. The combined income’s only enough to keep a roof over their heads and feed themselves.

We’ve progressed in some ways, but have we really progressed? We’re now bottom of the UNICEF league tables for industrialised countries. When you’re heading home feeling absolutely shattered, how cheering is it to know that although you’ve worn yourself out at work, you’re still letting down your kids?

We were like kids this morning as we peered out of our bedroom window to see whether the Met Office and the very cold night before had lived up to their promise of snow.

We weren’t disappointed. The snow was a couple couple of inches thick. We’d also taken the precaution of getting up at 6am to try to beat the inevitable transport chaos.

It was pretty precarious getting to the station, but it was beautiful.

At Harrow on the Hill Station, two workers were shovelling snow, whilst four stood and watched.

I waited 40 minutes for a train, which was announced as the last train into London for the morning due to a faulty train at Wembley Park. This train was packed and I very nearly didn’t bother getting on. On the way into London, there was a small scuffle in the carriage. People were tired and some were tense.

Coming home wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. This was mainly due to just giving up on the Circle line to get home and just walking part of the way.

Reminds me of the gag: “In Soviet Russia, tractors do not break down. How absurd to think otherwise! How we laugh as we plow the fields with our bare hands”.

I found out about Kasabian when listening to the Jo Whiley Show in the car a little while ago. I noticed that they were playing at the Royal Albert Hall on a benefit gig for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

So I went online this morning to book tickets, which went on sale at 0900. At that time, the site was down. Once I finally got through at 0918, the cheaper seats were gone and the pricier ones were left.

All OK so far.

It seems that the tradition is now to charge a booking fee, including online bookings where the sales process is self-service. Even cinema tickets booked online take a booking fee!

As if this wasn’t cheeky enough in itself when tickets are expensive as they are, it appears that online booking has discovered a new wheeze: the transaction fee! No mention of anything to do with credit card charges – it seemed to apply to all payment types.

I don’t mind contributing to charitable causes. I don’t mind paying for a service. But I do mind paying for self-service on a broadband connection that I pay for.

So I’d like to know what they think they’re playing at. I’m almost too miffed to buy the tickets on principle now, not merely because they’re stupidly expensive.